Qubes not loading without manual selection in boot menu. Is it actually a problem? And few more questions of newbie

You can get them from the Qubes Manager. Right click on sys-whonix and select “logs”. You will get a new window with different log files that you can copy to your clipboard.

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Strange. I did exactly what was told in this manual and system language didn’t change. It’s still remained English. I chose the language before login in system as there was told to do and It didn’t help anyway. I did it (update) in dom0 Terminal as it should have to be done.

Fun fact but during this system start was no errors with qrexec.

And log file is empty. :slightly_smiling_face:

I can’t really help with this. My system is based on English and I don’t use any other language. You should tag someone there and ask if anything has changed since then.

Could be a random issue if it runs now.

Hello again. Faced such problem. Maybe you know a little bit about how to help?

In the debian template terminal, run sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales, select your language (e.g. de_DE.UTF-8) with the space bar, and then hit enter. Select the language and press enter again. Reboot the template and you will have your system in your chosen language.

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Thanks! It helped. Though not everything there was translated (for example user folders) but most.

Hallo, folks! Marry Christmas to all! :christmas_tree:
I got few new questions (actually, what is missing here is a section like FAQ, which would be attached and where users could ask questions on a regular basis, so that they don’t have to create a new topic every time).

  1. When “updates through tor” item is checked during installation, does system perform checking for new updates through the Tor network too or also via clearnet? I got this question when one day I noticed that message about new update available appeared when network connection was established but connection to the Tor was not enabled yet.
  2. I discovered that unfortunately Qubes has no such good Tails’ features built-in like file shredding, meta data removing and hash sums colculating. Could you, please, tell me the names of these packages so that I can install them in terminal? I know that you can perform the same operations using terminal commands but I don’t want to f*** with terminal each time I need to use one of these features. It’s much better and faster when you can always just right-click on the file and choose one of those operations as it is implemented in Tails. I know for sure that it’s possible to add this “right-click” feature in linux because I already did the same when had an Ubuntu. And since Tails is Debian based and my default cubes are too, so it should probably work in Qubes too. I just did it a long time ago so don’t remember these package names and only remember that it took many time to find them, but maybe here are the guys who already know them and this could be a great help to me and many other users.

This is done using the running qube package manager. This means that it will use the qube netvm to search for new updates. So if you have a qube running with sys-firewall (and then sys-net), it will do the search with your real internet connection and not with Tor. The only part that uses Tor is when you update the template itself. In Qubes 4.2 you can control this in the global settings under “Updates”. On Qubes 4.1 you can manually add the “qubes-update-check” service per qube and uncheck it to disable it.

Not sure, but I think it uses mat2 and gtkhash. I don’t know what the shredding one is.

You can install both from the package manager (sudo apt install or sudo dnf install). You can then add custom actions in the xfce4 preferences menu.

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Also I didn’t see any utulities in Qubes that decrypt encrypted disks. Does it have it or you need to install it manually?
And have a question about image thumbnails. Once tried to check if they were created in local/cache folder and there wasn’t any. Are the Qubes configured not to create any thumbnail images by default?

You have to install what you want to use. For example, if you want to use veracrypt, you need to install it in a template and then run it from a qube.

For xfce4 based templates, it is set to “Never” in the settings. For gnome, I don’t think it’s disabled.

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I didn’t understand. You can or you can not to make Qubes perform update checking only via Tor? In my “Updates” section in Qubes Global Configs sys-whonix is everywhere chosen as updates qube and always have been. So does it mean that updates checking goes always only through Tor or not?
Wait, I think I’m beginning to understand! Do you mean that each qube performs updates checking separately? So if it has sys-firewall as qube for network access then it performs updates checking through clearnet? I thought that updates checking are somehow performed by dom0 (I know it hasn’t network access but anyway) or at least sys-whonix (if updates through tor was chosen during installation). It has no sense to give performing this procedure to qube itself! What reason to make updates through tor if updates checking can still be performed through clearnet?
Anyway I disabled network for all qubes except whonix based and sys-firewall. And still, as I remember, despite the fact that for the other qubes network was disabled, when some of the templates were started, the message about new update for them available still could appear when those updates were available.

Yes, exactly. The options you have in Qubes Global Settings only apply to templates (and standalones if you add them manually).

If the qubes you are using are attached to sys-whonix, they will use Tor to check for updates. You can exclude those that use clearnet netvms by adding the “qubes-update-check” service in the settings and unchecking it (to disable it).

Templates use a proxy service (tinyproxy) to be able to update/install packages without having a netvm attached. If you have selected sys-whonix, it will be used.

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You mean if sys-whonix is selected as qube for updates then it also will download packages during the procedure of installing in template some new applications, like the mat2 for example?

So is the ISP able to see that I’m using Qubes OS looking at those packages that go during that update checking if it was going through clearnet?

It will for templates, yes. Selecting sys-whonix in Qubes Global Settings will use it to update and install packages inside templates. For all app qubes, the package manager will check for updates using the netvm it is attached to.

Yes it can, since you are pulling package information from Qubes repository.

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If I disabled networking in all non-whonix qubes, except sys-firewall, chosen sys-whonix as updates qube, is there any clearnet traffic left that can be identified as traffic going from Qubes OS?

I installed these two applications and they appeared in applications menu, have their own GUI, but they didn’t appear in context menu (mouse right-click). Does it need only Gnome environment for this? Or there is some way to add them in context menu? I couldn’t find any related settings yet.

You can exclude checking for updates for specific qubes in Qubes OS Global Settings.
You can also change clearnet repositories to onion repositories in all your templates. This way the checking for updates won’t be leaked (at least for debian, not sure about fedora), because default apt policy forbids to resolve onion links directly without proxy.

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If only sys-whonix is used as netvm for app qubes, then yes. The other qubes without a netvm will no longer use clearnet to check for updates.

I am not sure if they offer actions ootb. You may need to add them manually from the custom actions menu. If you look in the “Edit” menu on xfce thunar, you will see a “Configure custom actions” option where you can create actions associated with them.

For GtkHash, for example, you can create a new action with the command /usr/bin/gtkhash %F and with appearance for everything except directories.

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Not sure if I understand right what exactly did you write that sentence for. What means “yes”? Question was: “is there any clearnet traffic left that can be identified as traffic going from Qubes OS?”

In Qubes Global Configs, in “Updates” section, I found paragraph “disable checking for updates for all existing qubes” and added exception for anon-whonix and whonix-workstation-17-dvm. Is this it? Is this the “official” way to prohibit certain qubes from performance updates checking? If so, will the rest of two excluded qubes check updates for non-whonix templates too?