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?

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?