Installing qubes, new machine.

[Denis Buchwalter]

I'm a long time Qubes user. Qubes has been happily running on an older laptop.

Decided to go for more modern hardware.

Long story made short. Apart from the graphic invite never showing (just plain old vga text messages scrolling), on the first few installations, there were some random problems ranging from not shutting down to missing the Qubes system tray icon, but it was installing.

Some red lines in dmesg, apparently unrelated to the issue(s), since, more or less, the same messages were shown after installing Debian 10, and fixed with some firmware (iwliwifi, realtek, and the nvidia driver).

Now, installation is impossible. The hardware is detected until the the USB boot drive, attached as a SCSI device (5:0:0:0). The size, serial number and so on is displayed, then it freezes for some time before showing an endless "dracut-initqueue timeout" message.

I'm at a loss.

Just in case: Intel i7-8750H, GeForce MX150

[Chris Laprise]

Nvidia is always a red flag. You could try the troubleshooting guide or
installing a driver:

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/nvidia-troubleshooting/
https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/install-nvidia-driver/

Since nvidia is generally a source a problems, I'd check to see if you
can change the BIOS/UEFI settings to turn off the Nvidia GPU and switch
to integrated Intel graphics (if available). That should raise the
compatibility profile substantially.

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Chris Laprise, tas...@posteo.net
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[dro...@gmail.com]

> there were some random problems ranging from not shutting down

I know this is the least of your problems right now, but since you mentioned it, I often had this problem after a fresh install, and finally figured out what is was. If Qubes is aware of available updates, sometimes it refuses to shut down. I literally had to yank the power cord, and remove the laptop battery.

After a fresh install, it is a good idea to one by one, manually update each and every cube, starting with dom0, of course. Then it will shut down.

Normally, I do a reboot after installing an OS, but not with Qubes. It wants those updates first, I guess. I may be wrong, but this works for me.

[Jon deps]

how did you create the install usb media?

so its a legacy boot ? have you changed the graphic settings in the
uefi-bios what are the options there

[davaiigoo]

Thanks for for the replies.

Two problems seems to be fixed.

how did you create the install usb media?

so its a legacy boot ?  have you changed the graphic settings in the
uefi-bios  what are the options there

The first one was the media creation, solved after a "dd" image on USB, as per Qubes documentation.

Regarding the NVIDIA graphic card, tried a million things, including https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/nvidia-troubleshooting/

and https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/install-nvidia-driver/.

Both are outdated (the latter mentions Fedora 18) and should probably not referred to any longer.

The solution seemed to remove/disable the 'nouveau' device in dom0, which is impossible because on the 8th or

9th generation Intel boards, the NVIDIA graphics are integrated, hence not even accessible from the BIOS. This is

according to my laptop vendor. 

Good news is: after updating dom0 from current-testing, the issue seems to be solved. No red lines in dmseg,

`sudo dmesg | grep nouveau` returns blank.

Am I right saying that Qubes developers have disabled 'nouveau' ?