Thanks for coming back to follow up. That disk monitor looks like mine now
I recommend trying kde as your desktop environment instead of xfce. I much prefer it
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Hi @Pacer.
Can I ask how did you do that? I need to reinstall my system after everything I want was configured. I reinstall more than 15 times for now, just learning… But no make any sense anymore.
Can you please explain?
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With an automatic configuration on installation, the system configures the root for 20 GB and the remaining (980 GB) for the vm-pool.
No ones answered how to mount properly. In every try, some !@#$ happens. When I try to use the LVM scheme, leave free space was not automatic expanded by LVM thin after first reboot. The same occurs with LVM thin scheme and just root mounted.
The question is: WHAT IS THE MOUNT POINT FOR VM POOL?
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i have the same problem and this is going to be such a pain to do. can’t i just install gparted in dom0 and try to mess around with things? in a worst case situation, i just have to reinstall anyway
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Isn’t the issue lvm2 provisioning related ? How are you going to fix that in gparted ? I just moved to a btrfs install and don’t have to administer lvm2 stuff anymore.
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I don’t know. My knowledge of computers is in the bottom quartile of Qubes users. I did try using gparted and there are no partitions related to this. So I don’t even know why they would be flipped like this. What did I do?
I am not sure what a btrfs install is. I remember there were 3 options possibly when trying to install and the only way to get LUKS2 and customize partitions was this hard option that was confusing, and that’s what I selected, and somehow I got it to work and now have a lot of data on a 4th partition and I have no idea how to do another reinstall.
Isn’t there any way to change this? I have very little data in qubes I care about, I just want to maintain the partition structure which was hard for me to figure out.
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Is this a fresh install or something older that is now experiencing a free space problem ?
If it’s a fresh install then something is wrong with the install and I suggest you redo it
There is a way to allocate more or less to different pools but you need to understand lvm2 a bit.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/LVM
Qubes install defaults to luks with ext4 and lvm2 running on that. You have to edit lvm2 with the command line.
I’ve had a few lvm2 systems and only one needed any lvm2 tweaking
Changing the install to btrfs (a different filesystem) is pretty easy. It’s either in advanced options or b-livet
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this is the second time i’ve had this problem too
i think this could be a bug in the install for manual partitioning
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@solene i think this is a bug in the installer and not user error. i was thinking of tagging alimirjamali but that person is a qubes developer and it may not be appropriate. (i know you’re a developer/computer scientist too, i think, but you do a lot of stuff on the forum) is this github issue tracker worthy? this is really frustrating. second install for me, same problem, another person said third install for them before it worked. it’s just a lot
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@FranklyFlawless do you understand why this is happening? it’s happened to me twice, it happened to someone else once. should i open a github issue? should i tag alimirjamali? i really don’t want to go through another install and have this happening again
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No, and you did not respond to @corny’s post earlier:
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This is a mostly fresh install. I installed it and there’s 100 GB in vm-pool and 800 GB in varlibqubes.
I didn’t realize it at first because when I installed it, yet again, there were just options to create system stuff, another partition, and a swap partition. There wasn’t even an option to divide things up into vm-pool and varlibqubes in the manual install configuration.
I got a winmax2, had trouble getting everything to work because it was AMD Ryzen, similar to the Framework issues. This got figured out.
The I did an install and this problem happened.
I did a second install and this happened again. I did create a few different qubes, but I had been using it for two weeks. I am hesitant to switch everything over and use Qubes as a daily driver since there have been so many problems, which is why I want to use it installed to a partition until I feel confident I can use it as a daily driver.
There’s no reason this should be happening over and over. I don’t know if I am making an error, but I didn’t even see an option to change things or select vm-pool versus varlibqubes or whatever the exact name is. I don’t even understand these different things. I remember for the swap partition, the amount I selected was very small.
Since someone else said they dealt with installing Qubes 3 times for this same problem, this could be a bug. I just don’t want to clog up github with issues if they are just user error, and i’ve only used linux for about 4 years and don’t have a programming or networking background.
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@alimirjamali should a file an issue on github?
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I did a quick review of the thread posts history. Here are my points:
- First and most of all, always keep backups. Please remember partitioning and OS installation could irreversibly erase data (on all drives).
- I am an ordinary Qubes OS user like others and not a part of Qubes core team. Please feel free to tag me. I will try to answer if I know the solution.
- Most probably no. Since this is a (relatively complex) generic partitioning question. But it involves some complex concepts such as CoW (Copy-on-write), Thin-provisioning and LVM volumes. Usually users do not need to bother about them if they select all the defaults in the installer. However, advanced users who are interested on custom partitioning have take some time and familiarize themself with those concepts and related workflow.
- Most probably no. Last time I checked, Gparted was not able to handle LVM volumes. Maybe there are other graphical tools for this but I am not aware of them.
- This is usually more flexible. Qubes uses a Reflink driver for BTRFS pools which gives more flexibility to users.
- BTRFs is a relatively new and modern filesystem. Just how Apple created APFs and switched to it; or how Microsoft is working on ReFS, Linux ecosystem needed modern filesystems. And BTRFs was one of those filesystems. openSUSE was one of the earliest Distros which switched to it as its default filesystem. Fedora also uses it as its default filesystem these days.
Please study some of the above references and concepts I shared above and feel free to ask further questions.
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I am trying to install Qubes to a second drive in a partition on that drive.
BTRFs will not work this way, the last time I checked.
I am not installing Qubes on my main drive as my daily driver when I’m barely getting it to work right now on this machine.
Every single time I install to this partition, my settings seem correct, and every single time I get this weird error. It’s a huge waste of time for me. I am not a system administrator but I’m not exactly stupid either. I’ve looked over these settings and have no idea why this continues to happen.
These are my current partitions:
the system partitions for qubes
the qubes partitions (main one and swap one)
and a data partition i am currently using to store data that is unrelated to Qubes
if I can successfully use Qubes, I’ll make this second drive the data drive and Qubes my primary OS on my main hard drive
when I go in to reinstall, and keep in mind I’ve already done this twice, I request them to delete the boot stuff (UEFI+other boot partition), I request them to delete the partition with Qubes and the swap, and then I request them to reinstall the boot partitions (which Qubes gives you the option of adding together as one unit in the manual install, you can select it as a unit without having to configure it much), I request them to reinstall the Qubes main volume and the swap volume and then enlarge the main volume to fit the remainder of the disk so that the total fills up the disk. (so boot volumes + qubes volumes + data volume = total disk volume). then i do the reinstall
Then 2 hours later, I end up with something that has the varlibqubes and vm-pool switched
2 times in a row. And I can’t even control these parameters in the install.
I also downloaded the iso both times, checked the hash both times, burned it to a USB both times
i know i’m not using correct terminology for partitions and all the different labels for the qubes volumes, but how on earth is this user error when the lvm partitions inside qubes are messed up and that’s not even an option in the manual partitioning? even if i am getting the terms wrong, there is not option for choosing the distribution of the lvm volume during the manual partitioning configuration
this really seems like an issue for github. do you see any reason why this has happened? i’ve tagged solei and frankly and no one seems to have a clear explanation
i like qubes but need to test it for a week or two without it breaking before making it a daily driver
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If you don’t see an exact similar issue for this problem already, please file a new issue and don’t feel bad if it later turns out to be a duplicate. If you have screenshots (e.g. via a mobile phone) of your partitioning workflow, include them in the issue.
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I didn’t have time for screenshots, and I wrote the issue up terribly with my limited knowledge, but it’s at least there.
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So this isn’t an error. What happens is in the manual configuration, the default amount for the Qubes system files is around 20 GB.
I saw that and thought “Well, I want it to use most of the drive.” So I put the maximum value possible, changing it from 20 GB to nearly 1000 GB.
Then during the second part of the install, it created vm-pool with the small remaining amount of the drive instead of putting it into that partition.
So there’s nothing wrong, but the instructions don’t make clear (at least on that screen) that vm-pool with be created with whatever remaining space there is on the drive.
It’s such a simple solution, that I completely didn’t see, that I have a hard time believing no one else who read this knew the answer.
I need to remove the github issue and feel stupid about this, although since it affected at least one other user, it might be good if the manual configuration screen clarified that the vm-pool is created with the remaining space on the drive.
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Thank you OP for your efforts on this thread. I have also had this problem and re-installed several times trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. I have done a lot of research and reading and could not figure this out for the life of me. I see this is not a RTFM issue. Some clearer guidance on the storage aspect of custom installs, would be a great addition and a line on this specific item would help a lot of people I’m sure. In fact something more on managing storage in Qubes in general would be great. If I was more experienced I would write it myself and contribute it. I think Qubes is so important and great work.
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i need to update the issue to clarify this isn’t exactly a bug, but it’s so unclear it’s repeatedly leading to user error
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