4.0 rc-4 Blank screen on booting
SM
I installed qubes 4.0 rc-4 on my hp laptop the installation went perfectly fine. I rebooted after the installation was over, laptop boots into qubes and after a few lines passing by there is a blank screen endlessly.
I am dual booting with windows. Is there anything that I need to modify I order for this to work correctly.
Thanks
Yuraeitha
It's unlikely to be caused by Windows, just be sure you know what you do in advance so you don't wipe your Windows install or make it unbootable. Also take note, Qubes is less secure when using dual-boot, although if you have to dual-boot, then Qubes is still worth it in terms of security, it's just "less" secure than it could be, although the risk are typically exotic attacks, but in the future they may become common attacks.
As for the black screen,
- It sounds a lot like a graphic driver issue, did Qubes 4 work on previous versions?
- Does Qubes 3.2. work on this machine?
- Does other Linux/kernel's work on this machine?
- Did you check and make sure settings are correct in UEFI? Sometimes unobvious settings, even graphic settings in UEFI, can cause boot issues for Qubes.
- Did you try change between UEFI/EFI and LegacyBIOS/Grub boot?'
- Does your laptop support Qubes minimum specifications? Do you get a lack of hardware-support warning during early Qubes install? Do you have virtualization on your Intel or AMD CPU/Motherboard? Is it enabled in UEFI?
If the graphic driver is bad, then you can try change it in Grub menu (assuming you installed with Grub, which makes this easier to fix). As for which driver to change into, I'm not sure, but there are people around here far, far more knowledgable than I, so maybe wait for those and hope someone will post. You can also find a lot of graphic boot fixes in other Linux discussions, try google it up. If this is the fault, then it's not uniquely a Qubes issue, and you can find a lot of topics on this on the internet. Meanwhile I can offer some other work-arounds you can try.
Please read them all before picking one, one may be more attractive to try than another.
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One alternative is to try install RC-3 or RC-2 instead, these are direct updateable to the same updates in RC-4. The reason they released new RC-x versions, as far as I can tell, is only because of two reasons, first better working out-of-the-box with fewer required updates to get things started, and second and more importantly, boot issues and hardware support, for example like these. Odds are that something was changed which might not work for your hardware, so it's worth trying to see if you install RC-3 or RC-2.
Don't install RC-1, as noted here:
"As a consequence of the partition layout change, it will be necessary for current 4.0-rc1 testers to perform a clean reinstall of 4.0-rc2 rather than attempting to upgrade in-place." https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2017/10/23/qubes-40-rc2/
But you can install RC-2, as noted here:
"Current users of Qubes 4.0-rc2 can upgrade in-place by downloading the latest updates from the testing repositories in both dom0 and TemplateVMs." https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2017/11/27/qubes-40-rc3/
And you can install RC-3, as noted here:
"Current users of Qubes 4.0-rc3 can upgrade in-place by downloading the latest updates from the testing repositories in both dom0 and TemplateVMs. As explained in QSB #37, Qubes 4.0-rc4 uses PVH instead of HVM for almost all VMs without PCI devices by default as a security measure against Meltdown, and this change will also be released as a patch for existing Qubes 4.0 installations in the coming days. Therefore, current Qubes 4.0 users will benefit from this change whether they upgrade in-place from a previous release candidate or perform a clean installation of 4.0-rc4." https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2018/01/31/qubes-40-rc4/
* * * *
Keep in mind to follow the link above in case you pick a RC-3 version to try, to read up on any details, for example RC-3 to RC-4 has some upgrade details to take note on.
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A third approach could be to take out the drive and install Qubes on another machine, then update everything on the other machine, before putting it back in your first machine again. This way you can often bypass issues that are later fixed, or only occurring during install. Just make sure you trust your second machines hardware, and remove any existing drives during install, and don't install with UEFI/EFI on the second machine if you got existing UEFI/EFI installs on it, it can sometimes be messy to restore UEFI/EFI paths, you may loose these OS systems. Use LegacyBIOS/Grub install, it's much safer. I've managed to install a good handful Qubes 4 systems using this approach, which otherwise would not have worked despite hours of debugging. So this may be worth a shot for you too.
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Last approach I can think of right now, is to boot into Qubes using the rescue Qubes option during Qubes installer grub menu. Login to your existing install, and it should help you to get through your LUKS password as well as chroot for you, so it's relatively easy to reach dom0 this way. X-server and high-end graphics are not started, you may very well be able to reach dom0 this way. You'll have to finish the last step configuration from the menu, but it should be straiht forward. If successful with the last config during install, and you got a cable network that works successfully too without a password etc., then you can simply update Qubes from the dom0 terminal you booted into, without seeing any graphics whatsoever. This may, or may not, fix your issue. There has been a new kernel release since RC-4 was released, it may very well be what you need. It should be in current-testing release atm. Also if you can fetch older Kernels/Xen versions, this might work too.
Yuraeitha
Also remember the act of taking out your drive which also has Windows installed on it, and putting it in another machine, as I suggested in one of the examples above, may break Windows's ability to boot in UEFI/EFI once you put it back in again. So be sure you backup your Windows and any valuable data on the drive if you try this approach, just to be safe. Windows is generally more robust when it comes to restoring UEFI/EFI, but you can never be too careful with this kind of buggy crapware that is UEFI, not to mention, Windows. So be careful here if you go with the drive swap approach, there may be dragons for any existing data, both on the drive itself, and the other machine's UEFI/EFI paths too.
Yuraeitha
If you're installing Qubes for the first time, then the most obvious first place to look is if you're using nvidia or other high-end graphic cards on Qubes, especially and most importantly, nvidia does frequently not work out-of-the-box. Intel graphics tend to work quite nice out-of-the-box though.
If your laptop have two graphic cards as many laptops tend to have these days, then try make a temporary solution and disable the extra graphic card, and use the one that is considering onboard. For example you may very well have an Intel graphic card on that HP laptop. This would probably be the first thing to try if you haven't tried this already.
SM
As for the laptop part it’s a fairly old machine, and it does satisfy the hardware requirements. I did have Debian stretch installed previously and it was working great.
For the hardware warning part the installation starts without any warnings and boots into graphical installer and the installation completes normally with no errors.
After booting into qubes initially the boot is successful but the screen never displays the login screen, it goes blank. I’d like to try if there is anything I can do on the machine before I take the drive to other machine or something like that.
The last solution you mentioned about updating dom0 by getting into current installation could expand on that please. Could you guide me on how that can be done?
Thanks