Hi all,
DEAR MODS: If I should have sent this to the wrong place, or if I should go about this in a different way, please do tell me. Doing my best in good faith, willing to learn.
Qubes beginner here who feels like he’s fairly good at flying a Cessna (Mint) and is now trying to fly a fighter jet… so many additional buttons and switches in this cockpit! Some help would be awesome…
First things first: Thank you so much for creating Qubes! I hugely appreciate the immense amounts of time and energy that have been put into this, and continue to be put into it, and I am very grateful that there are capable people in the world who provide me with such a powerful tool.
This post got longer than planned, so
H E R E I S T H E B R I E F V E R S I O N O F T H I S P O S T :
QUESTION: Would you be willing to walk me through the process of installing Freeplane on Qubes / Whonix-Qubes?
DONE SO FAR: Managed successful disable of Intel ME via 1vyrain and then Qubes / Whonix-Qubes install on an X230 i7 with 16 GB RAM and SSD.
NEXT GOAL: I want to install Freeplane and test whether it runs well enough on this machine on Qubes with rather large mindmap files. Freeplane is a deal breaker must-have software for me, so installing and testing it is the first next step I want to focus on. If it helps, I don’t need Freeplane to have net access, actually might even prefer it not to have net access, so maybe a standalone / vault type VM just for Freeplane might make sense. Tried to install it several times, really unsure why I didn’t succeed so far, despite lots of reading and my best efforts. If Freeplane works well, I want to use Qubes as my daily driver as soon as possible. I’m hoping that I’m not delusional to hope that I can learn to do that.
ABOUT ME: 10 years of Linux use (mostly Mint) and converting others to Linux. Have done some programming in the long distant past but not considering myself a programmer. Done occasional command line stuff when a particular need arose, by seeking out and following instructions. Constantly broadening my horizon re security and privacy, and valuing both very much. I understand the value of the compartmentalization approach of Qubes for security and privacy, and have a fairly clear idea how I want to make use of that. Unfortunately I’m still lacking a lot on the practical side, I still need to learn how to actually operate Qubes. In other words, I can probably draw my ideal Qubes diagram without too much trouble, but don’t know how to then actually create that setup. I’m guessing and hoping that my level of skills just about puts me in the “minimum user requirements” range for using Qubes.
Thank you for reading this far, would be great to hear back from you, have a great day!
If you have some more time here are some more details and thoughts, but
F E E L F R E E T O S K I P T H E R E S T F R O M H E R E :
My guess is that if I had someone sitting next to me who knows how to work Qubes, I would probably learn what I need to learn to then continue mostly on my own within an hour or maybe even less.
I find the process of digging through documentation and piecing it together from there extremely slow.
So slow in fact that that alone could become a deal breaker for me for Qubes, because unfortunately, while I have some time that I can dedicate to this, I don’t have unlimited amounts of time.
At the pace I’m currently going it could take me weeks just to be able to actually start using Qubes in real life, but I don’t have weeks because I actually need to be able to use this machine for real purposes very soon.
So either I can learn to at least start using Qubes as my daily driver within a week or two, or I’ll need to shelve Qubes for the time being, and go back to Mint.
I really like Mint, but Qubes is in a completely different league in what it makes possible, so I am definitely motivated to make that switch.
I have the suspicion (and the hope) that this is just an initial barrier that I need to push through, and that with help, this might not necessarily take overly long.
But right now I’m stuck.
The Freeplane install and test is first on the agenda.
If that’s successful, the next goal is to then decide exactly what I want my compartmentalization to look like, and then set things up accordingly - deciding in which way which qubes connect to the net, installing software in various qubes, data storage decisions, etc.
But I would like to focus on step 1 (testing Freeplane) first, and then think about this next.
Yeah so that’s where I’m at at the moment.
Any takers who would like to talk me through the process of installing Freeplane, for a start? Please?
I could really do with some help…
Thank you for reading, keep being awesome, have a peaceful day!
Jack