Installed Qubes 4.3 directly on USB drive, can't connect USB devices

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1

Hi,

I installed Qubes 4.3 directly on USB so I can have a portable system but I don’t have a sys-usb qubes, it wouldn’t allow me to create it during the post-install. Everything works fine but I can’t attach USB devices: flash drives, usb wifi adapter, usb phone tethering, etc. They don’t show up under the USB icon when I insert them…

What can I do?

2

Buy another usb controller and insert it into PCI and then make sys-usb and attach newly installed pci-usb card to it.
Then you could use usb devices with that pci-usb card.

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3

Well the idea is to have a portable Qubes, I don’t want to fiddle with any hardware.

One option that seems promising is to go in the devices section of a vm and attach the usb pci controller I am connected to. The problem is figuring out which is the right one, because I attached the one that had the Qubes usb and broke the whole setup and I had to reinstall…
If there is only one usb controller then this won’t work, the qubes usb is connected to it.

I am seeing the usb device in dom0 with lsusb command but can’t figure out what command-line to use to attach it. The qvm-usb command shows nothing when I run it, guess it’s only for usb’s already attached to vm’s.

4

You can check usb controllers with lspci command:

lspci -nnq |grep -i usb

on my system it looks like 2 controllers but i suspect that 2nd one is just like usb hub to the main, TB4

00:0d.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-P Thunderbolt 4 USB Controller [8086:461e] (rev 04)
00:0d.2 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-P Thunderbolt 4 NHI #0 [8086:463e] (rev 04)
00:0d.3 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-P Thunderbolt 4 NHI #1 [8086:466d] (rev 04)
00:14.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation Alder Lake PCH USB 3.2 xHCI Host Controller [8086:51ed] (rev 01)

but I have all 4 attached to sys-usb and don’t wan’t to mess with it