Qubes: Manual Installation Guide without GUI-Installer?

General Discussion
1

Do we have any complete installation instructions to avoid the GUI-Installer?

I’m fighting with this installer as it lacks several configuration details for disks with lvm. The problem is, it can’t even read a pre-prepared layout completely, why I can’t start the installation.

Because of this, I would like to do a manual install.

  1. open all lvm related stuff
  2. set mount points to where they belong
  3. choose the places for the thin-pools manually

for then starting a manual installation.

Within this black box of GUI-Installer all this isn’t possible.

Can anyone help, please?

1 Like
2

Bivet-GUI option don’t work for you?

3

no, that’s the black box …

4

I would also like to know what the appopriate script (that calls a collection of scripts) to run the equivalent of

qubes-install.sh /dev/target_disk

and if $? == 0 then another machine can boot contents of target_disk for a production-ready QubesOS.

5

A bit more explanation about what I need:

I can’t find any information, what PVs (phys. vol.), what VGs (vol. groups) or LVs (log. vol) and so on have to exist and where they have to be mounted to and - better for understanding the situation - why these settings are needed.

Without this, one can’t pre-prepare anything.

Even the guide to prepare a single disk manually stops after preparing the disk structures and ends with “use the gui for the rest”.

I tried with all three versions of the gui installer: automatic, adapted and blivet-gui, but I was not able to get the installation to start.

I’ve no chance to find out, what I did wrong or what I forgot, as I’ve no checklist or documentation to read.

6
7

Thanks again, but this is not that what I need:

This is “standard stuff” about LVM and how to use it for standard tasks.

What I need to know is, what Qubes does during the install process.

For example that part where the installer creates the Raid 0 is not needed when I will install a Raid 5.

But I can’t just change this one command, as the LVM environment for the Raid 5 is more complicated. Especially the thin-pools and -volumes need to be created differently as Raid 5 and “thin-…” are not really friends.

I’ll have to adapt the further installation to this different configuration. But without knowledge about the exact tasks, this is not possible.

8

The source code is open and available.

9

I know it’s open and I know the GitHub repository.

But finding this special information without having an idea what parts to look into is ugly.

Do you’ve got a link or just the part of the documentation, I have to look deeper?

10

I’m not sure if I learned during my experiments or if the blivet-gui got some enhancements with the 4.3 release of the installer:

Now I was able to do the complete install within the GUI-Installer.

  • same partitionlayout on all 3 SSDs
  • Qubes-OS now is running on a LVM software RAID5

My system has got the the following setup:

  • separate partitions for EFI and Boot (I duplicated the files later manually for redundancy.)
  • rest of space as one LUKS encrypted partition
  • I put all 3 LUKS encrypted partitions in one LVM volume group “qubes_dom0” as base for LVM software raid5.
  • thinpool “root-pool” on the raid5
  • thinvolumes “swap” and “root” in this thinpool
  • thinpool “vm-pool” on the raid5 (used later in the second step, when creating the VMs)

The correct “names” were mandatory. After using them, the complete installation run without any warnings or errors.

I’m writing this post from the newly installed Qubes-OS 4.3.

1 Like
11

This guide does partitioning, encryption, and filesystem creation in CLI:

Create pools the way you want, and enter it in post-install configuration GUI

I guess I’m a bit late with that

12

Yeah, but it doesn’t matter. :wink:

Thanks for your answer anyway.

Many people were working on this theme and for now we’ve got some walkable ways to do a non-default installation.

Now one of us should find the time to put all this in one installation guide/manual. But seeing my resources, I won’t be able to do this before Eastern.