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Qubes “OS” — not for the common folk, part 1 — it won’t install!

2 min readApr 19, 2022

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I’ve been hearing about this wondrous OS (note: not really an OS — more on that later) called Qubes. It’s like a paranoid’s dream — everything isolated, no need for processes to trust each other, malware has a very limited attack surface, etc. Cool! I just had to try it.

My main computer is circa 2016, but still quite potent — i5–6400 CPU (4 cores/4threads), 32 GiB RAM, two SSD drives, an Nvidia-1060 with 3 GiB video RAM, an extra PCIe-USB hub (that turned up to be very useful down the line), and many USB devices. My daily driver is Windows-10 (mostly out of nostalgia).

My first SSD drive is Samsung 850 PRO; it holds win-10. My second drive is for experiments, just like this one. For obvious reasons I decided to use my second drive for Qubes. Booted from a USB flash drive and installed Qbues-4.1 on the second drive. Reboot — and nothing. BIOS/UEFI doesn’t see anything to boot from on drive-2. I boot into another flavor of linux and inspect the second drive — it’s all there, all partitions, system EFI, except */BOOT/ is empty. I check the forums — and there’s a totally useless paper on dealing with UEFI problems in Qubes. The stuff just doesn’t reflect the reality of my drive-2, let alone the suggestions.

Fine, I delete everything and try ubuntu-desktop-21.10, thinking maybe there’s something wrong with my drive, which the installer just doesn’t report. Ubuntu just installs and boots — no problem at all. Oh, and it allows me to install native Nvidia drivers (v510 — more on that later). Ok, so the drive is okay. I delete everything and re-install Qubes. Same as before — installation succeeds, but no bootable EFI partition.

Ok, I physically disconnect the power from my drive-1, so my drive-2 becomes /dev/sda, boot from USB, and install Qubes. Ha! Again it doesn’t boot. This is ridiculous! Even in greenhouse conditions, the installer fails!

Finally, I deleted everything, installed Ubuntu with system-EFI and a small (50gig) partition, and then installed Qubes into the remaining space. NOW it boots, even from drive-2. My BIOS/UEFI boot menu displays a choice of three OSes — Win10/Ubuntu/Qubes, as it should.

And that’s just the installation. It only gets more complicated once you boot into it.

(to be continued)

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