I just moved out into a rural area with no wired connection. I’m relying entirely on wifi connection to a netgear router. Successfully connected to wifi on Qubes with an Alfa AWUS036AC adapter when I was still at home, but was having trouble connecting after I moved. After exhausting all possibilities I could think of, I just decided to reinstall the whole OS.
Since the desktop doesn’t have a network connection during the installation sequence (because the drivers have to be installed manually), Qubes can’t download any of the base templates. The installation completes successfully, but without any templates, it’s unusable. Is there any way around this?
Try restoring your old templates from backup, if you have them. Even an old template is better than none at all. Once it’s semi-functional then you will have many more options.
You could try tethering directly to your cellphone to download what you need, if your phone plan allows that. This could get very expensive depending on your plan, and take a long time for updates (e.g. overnight).
Anyone out there use satellite for Internet? Round trip latencies will be an issue but downloading should work fine I bet.
I’m guessing its not, but if it is a laptop just take it to a coffee shop with open wifi. You might get a cheap qubes laptop and just bring home your rpm updates.
You don’t need to download the base templates - at least some of them
are included on the install iso: fedora-36, debian-11 and whonix.
When you restart Qubes after installation you should be prompted as to
which templates you want to install, and you can then choose which to
use. All this is done offline.
The templates are always available from the install iso image - you can
mount this image, and then install the qubes-template packages from
“Packages” directory
Was able to solve this by tethering with my phone. Before this, all the template options were unchecked and greyed out, along with most of the other install options, so I’m not sure what was going on there.