i am trying to install Qubes on a VM on a Ubuntu Desktop (24.04). I know, that is not the common way to do it and qubes supposes to be installed bare metal.
So I am running Ubuntu. I installed VMware Workstation 17 Pro and i have a VM with Windows 7 running on it, where i can activate VT-x.
When I want to create a VM with the current Qubes OS iso i do following config:
128 GB SSD
16 GB RAM
Baseline Fedora 64bit
CPU 2 cores
Here I have the issue, that the virtualisation VT-x is grayed out. I can not activate it.
So this is where I am struggeling.
Hope someone can help. Thanks a lot
i now managed to activate the CPU virtualisation. I get the menue where i can choose to install or test Qubes. When I select Install, it tooks to seconds and the same menue appears…
What is my mistake here? beside dont using bare metal installation
Last I read, Qubes does not allow for Virtual machines to be nested.
Last I read, VMware, is not as secure between virtual containers as Qubes is. but VMware might have improved. 12 years ago I used VMware, and it was smooth by what it said it would do.
Xen, the Qubes hypervisor, is highly regarded and is considered reliable to keep information, possible malware isolated into its own Qube.
If Qubes is not installed bare metal, such as when installing it alongside some other OS, then it is not as secure.
When I used VMware, I had a Mac Book Pro, which it turned out had a WiFi chip inside which could never be spoofed, and could be, so I was told, always tracked across the internet. IMO. A WiFi chip not having the capability to allow me, my computer, to be used anonymously, is not the kind of thing which a PC manufacturer would care about. Which is an overall thinking pattern of computer manufacturers.
Please see the ticket Kernels built since 2024.10.05 unable to start a graphical session in VMware Workstation · Issue #9707 · QubesOS/qubes-issues · GitHub
In short, this setup won’t work. Still, maybe an alternative hypervisor would be just fine for your case?
You could write, what the goal is, for instance just testing out the Qubes OS workflow without a bare-metal installation, and if you’re OK with installing other hypervisors, like KVM or VirtualBox. Then, it’s a matter of providing instructions on how to workaround certain issues. I wrote a guide for that some time ago, here.
