Use a Qubes OS machine as home lab?

General Discussion
3

Thank you for the feedback and hardware recommendations.

This indeed seems like the right order to get started with Qubes OS:

  1. First pick and buy hardware from the hardware compatibility list
  2. Install Qubes OS on it
  3. Have a good experience where you don’t run into too many unknown bugs

I did it the other (wrong) way round and it’s a journey of pain and suffering for me as a beginner so far.

  1. Buy hardware without ever looking into the hardware compatibility list
  2. Discover Qubes OS
  3. Install Qubes OS on said hardware because it seems cool
  4. Installation was successful, only ran into some minor problems (which I could fix)
  5. Once it’s installed run into real problems for my use case (suspend not working)
  6. Discover the hardware compatibility list and notice that my platform isn’t tested (yet)
  7. Spend a lot of time trying to get things working anyway
  8. (Probably will give up in the next 3-4h if I don’t get it to work the way I want it to work)

I’ll play around with it a bit more for now though. Still kind of curious if Qubes OS would make for a good lab box. So far nobody has told me that it’s a terrible idea.

As for my suspend problem on the HP Victus 15L machine:
tl;dr: Kernen update didn’t help. Checking some logs and settings next before I give up.

  1. Managed to get networking working on Qubes OS, it was surprisingly painless (Just plug in the ethernet cable then start a browser, I couldn’t be bothered with the WiFi)
  2. Downloaded kernel 6.3.9-1 on some cube by following this guide (was painless too)
  3. Took me a good while to get qvm-copy-to-dom0 working (pain)… if you are used to just copy & paste everything everywhere within seconds then the journey to copy the code from here on a cube and then get it over to dom0 (it’s all described in the link above) is quite scenic and long (i can never confess to anyone that I spent over half an hour trying to copy and paste 20 lines of code. If you’re a beginner and don’t want to waste too much time with this but just want to get done with a kernel update just fire up nano on dom0 and quickly type those 20 lines of code). On the bright side you learn about why they make it that difficult on purpose for a good reason.
  4. Once I finally had the qvm-copy-to-dom0 all that was left ot do was to make it executable (chmod u+x qvm-copy-to-dom0 and then run it)
    After that getting the kernel.tar file over to dom0 was easy with qvm-copy-to-dom0
  5. Unpacking and installing the kernel files in dom0 was surprisingly easy and painless, seemed like a much scarier thing to me as a novice (I tweaked the command to sudo dnf install -y kernel-latest-*.rpm which just installed all four kernel .rpms I had downloaded. When I followed this guide word by word it complained something about dom0 not having internet access (guess I made a typo somewhere and it tried to find the .rpm in an online repo which obviously will fail on dom0))
  6. After a reboot the new kernel was up and running (uname -r)
  7. However suspend still isn’t working properly on my HP Victus 15L with the new kernel 6.3.9-1… or well suspend is but resume not really, screen just stays black after resume

Will waste a bit more time on debugging it this week but might eventually decide to opt for the less painful way and either just get hardware that lets Qubes OS behave the way I want it to behave out of box or work with what I have and find some completely different hypervisor that is less pain to get it up and running on my HP box.

Hope those experiences help some other beginners that are looking into Qubes OS.

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