Qubes-dist-upgrade not available in 4.2

Olive · January 17, 2025, 1:33pm

Hello,

I have been using Qubes 4.2 from the early days of its release. I have upgraded from 4.1 to 4.2 as proposed at that time. All my templates except one are new templates (I download the newest version each time it is released, and then duplicate and amend it as per my requirements).

This one template for which I have always done “in template upgrades” is actually a standalone VM based on Fedora. Initially it was Fedora 36. Now it is Fedora 39. But I can’t upgrade it further to Fedora 41. The reason is the template is still configured for Qubes 4.1.

The current procedure for upgrading Qubes from 4.1 to 4.2 includes a preliminary step to make templates compatible with 4.2 with qubes-dist-upgrade . But this step did not exist when I upgraded from 4.1 to 4.2. Hence I never did it. Still, I should update my standalone template…

I have tried to download qubes-dist-upgrade but I get an error message:
sudo qubes-dom0-update -y qubes-dist-upgrade
[…]
Fedora 37 - x86_64 - Updates
[…]
no match for argument qubes-dist-upgrade

Any idea how I could upgrade my standalone VM to 4.2 to enable further updates of Fedora?

Thanks !

DVM · January 17, 2025, 1:48pm

Use the following script inside your standalone:

github.com

QubesOS/qubes-dist-upgrade/blob/main/scripts/upgrade-template-standalone.sh

#!/usr/bin/bash

# Frédéric Pierret (fepitre) frederic.pierret@qubes-os.org
# Exit codes:
# 0: OK
# 1: General errors
# 2: Unsupported distribution
# 3: Upgrade failed

set -ex

if [[ $EUID -ne 0 ]]; then
   echo "ERROR: This script must be run with root permissions" 
   exit 1
fi

if [ -e /etc/fedora-release ]; then
    releasever="$(awk '{print $3}' /etc/fedora-release)"
    # Check Fedora supported release
    if [ "$releasever" -lt 37 ]; then

This file has been truncated. show original

It’s the script used by qubes-dist-upgrade

Olive · January 17, 2025, 3:30pm

Merci !
Everything worked well:
1- the script in the template, and then
2- the in-template upgrade to Fedora 41.

OvalZero · January 18, 2025, 2:15pm

Just out of curiosity:

[1] Did you test networking? (NFS/SMB)
[2] Are menu entries from AppVMs based on that template “sane”?

Tried the same three weeks ago. Upgrading from a fedora-40-xfce template as well as downloading the new fedora-41-xfce template (built 20th December 24) … neither were working as expected.

Olive · January 21, 2025, 6:46pm

[1] I managed to connect to the internet to upgrade this Standalone and to work from it, but I did not test local network capabilities.
[2] I had a problem with the Standalone features : the version of Fedora and its end of life date were the old ones. It was triggering error messages from Qubes Update. I updated them with qvm.features. Everything else is fine.