Qubes OS R4.3-alpha Preview

alimirjamali · September 13, 2024, 9:22am

Regretfully it appears that this is not working. See the screenshot below

barto · September 13, 2024, 9:25am

Ugh. It’s been dropped, seemingly, and only the configuration item is available:
https://dnf5.readthedocs.io/en/latest/changes.html#changes-to-individual-options

alimirjamali · September 14, 2024, 7:37pm

Ok. Back to the above. This could be done by adding a new option to qrexec-client to filter out the whole ANSI escape sequences. Or maybe the existing -t & -T options should do it. The existing do_replace_chars of libqrexec only replaces few chars with underline.

Another approach would be doing this at qvm-run level in Python. There are easy to use Regex workarounds.

alimirjamali · September 14, 2024, 11:07pm

Another bug which is most probably DNF5 related. qvm-template and qubes-template-manager (GUI) are broken with Fedora 41 based UpdateVMs:

Could be related to order of arguments passed to qvm-template-repo-query script. Or how DNF5 formats the output.

marmarek · September 15, 2024, 1:26pm

--setopt=color=never?

alimirjamali · September 15, 2024, 2:22pm

Regretfully no:

fjdh · September 15, 2024, 4:12pm

bug that exists in 4.2 and 4.3: if you have configured custom colors, you cannot restore the VMs until you create a custom color with the same name on the new system, and there is no way to select ‘ignore missing colors’ like you can with dom0 user mismatch etc.

alimirjamali · September 15, 2024, 4:27pm

Turns out to be the DNF5 output mismatch:

They broke backward compatibility for %{reponame} and %{buildtime} used here:

github.com

QubesOS/qubes-core-agent-linux/blob/main/qubes-rpc/qvm-template-repo-query#L52


      
          # unchanged otherwise.
          # We then copy the {c,m}time to the repo config.
          # This allows DNF caching to work properly.
          hashfile="/tmp/qvm-template-$(b2sum "$repodir/template.repo" | cut -f1 -d' ')"
          touch -a "$hashfile"
          touch -r "$hashfile" "$repodir/template.repo"
          
          RET=0
          
          if [ "$1" = "query" ]; then
              dnf repoquery "${OPTS[@]}" --qf='%{name}|%{epoch}|%{version}|%{release}|%{reponame}|%{downloadsize}|%{buildtime}|%{license}|%{url}|%{summary}|%{description}|' "$SPEC"
              RET="$?"
          elif [ "$1" = "download" ]; then
              # Download/retry algorithm: take mirrors in random order. In this order,
              # try to download from the first one - if download failed but anything was
              # downloaded - retry from the same one. If download failed and nothing was
              # downloaded, go to the next one. The intention is to retry on interrupted
              # connection, but skip mirrors that are not synchronized yet.
              urls="$(dnf downloadurl "${OPTS[@]}" --url --all-mirrors "$SPEC" | shuf)"
              readarray -t urls <<<"$urls"
              downloaded=0

Also DNF4 prints an extra line after repoquery (which the code expects) whereas DNF5 does not. Overall it is easy to fix.

alimirjamali · September 15, 2024, 4:29pm

I believe restore mechanism should be fixed to revert to Red Label on missing colors. And Red Label should be made a red line (The label that is not allowed to be deleted)

alimirjamali · September 16, 2024, 4:40pm

I submitted the patch to support DNF5 based UpdateVMs with qvm-template. The existing unittest for qvm-template is a freakin’ 5643 line (236KB) file. If anyone is interested on working with unittests, there is room to consolidate some of tests together.

alimirjamali · October 2, 2024, 3:49pm

I submitted a patch to DNF5 to reintroduce the --color option. It appears that they wanted to re-implement it but did not have time. Awaiting review.

p.s.: Contrary to what the DNF5 change notes mentions, the configuration is also ineffective at the moment.

barto · October 18, 2024, 8:18am

Hi @alimirjamali ,
Can you please add the “version-r43” tag to this topic?
Searching the forum for the “version-r43” tag returns only two (other) topics, and I think that the current topic to be by far more relevant.
Thanks.

I’m tempted to install a bare-bone 4.2.3 system on a spare machine, and upgrade it following the manual steps outlined by you.

alimirjamali · October 18, 2024, 8:37am

It appears that my current discourse trust level does not allow me to do it. Hopefully one of the mods would do it.

Is the above for personal education or experiment? Or you are planning to replicate it on your actual machine?

In the meantime, it should be noted that Fedora 41 release date is approaching soon.

barto · October 18, 2024, 9:11am

Yes, experimenting. And no, not on my main machine.
I have another laptop for fun projects…

ludovic · October 18, 2024, 10:06pm

Done.

3isenHeiM · February 6, 2025, 2:04pm

Hey everyone,

Just a heads-up since I’m also testing the 4.3 release, since I have some HW compatibility issues running Qubes stable on a Dell Precision 5690 (nov 2024).

I’ve downloaded the testing iso Qubes-4.3.202502042300 from here.

Installation went smooth, no issues to report.
As far as my Qubes usage is ongoing, I haven’t encountered any issues, but I’ll post them if any.

Edit: Should I submit a HCL compatibility report for this, although it’s 4.3 ?

alimirjamali · February 6, 2025, 2:07pm

That is awesome. If would be great if you could post the HCL report as well. It would be extremely helpful to other users

deeplow · February 12, 2025, 7:48am

2 posts were split to a new topic: Dell Precision 5690 (Qubes 4.3 alpha)

MSQLI · February 6, 2025, 6:30pm

Are you able to install hvm’s from iso?

3isenHeiM · February 11, 2025, 3:29pm

I’ve tried with a Windows 11 iso, and I get a black screen windows when booting on the ISO itself No cursor no nothing