Some problems with 4.0.2-rc1

[donoban]

Hi,

Yesterday I upgraded a hard disk on my laptop and reinstalled Qubes. I
would like to share some problems that I encountered, sorry if some of
them (or all) are already known.

1) Anaconda GUI freezes after few seconds if I have HDMI monitor
connected. Maybe this is related to nouveau, after disconnecting the
monitor I could install without problem.

2) Btrfs installation seems too hard. After some tries I did an
unbootable installation. Finally I used a default install and added a
btrfs pool with the new hard disk.

3) Installing non US language seems problematic. I selected Spanish and
I'm getting a lot of 'UnicodeEncodeError' on dom0 (qubes-dom0-update
e.g.). Currently my LANG env is C.utf8, should not it be es_ES@utf8?
Also I see all GUI in English.

4) After setting default pool to the new btrfs disk (near 2TB), I
started a full restore of 160GB. Some hours later it stopped because the
other pool was full since it was using it for temp directory. It also
created all the domains which I had to manually remove, and also it
removed all the temporary files which maybe I could used manually for
restore some domains.

- It would be nice to check the needed space before starting and abort
if there is no enough.

- Could the restore process work with each VM individually? Recreate
one, uncompress the data, dump it to the private volume, delete
temporary files, go to next... This way in case of error we would have
some domains fine and just one broken.

- In case of error maybe it should ask if you want to delete the
temporary files or not. So you can try to do something manually.

- I also think that restore process is too aggressive. My pc becomes
near totally unresponsive while restoring. I wonder if some process
could be queued to avoid too much stress. I would like to do some stuff
while restoring some domains. In the other case, running a backup, it
runs very well.

5) After restoring the backup I installed KDE. It was pretty ugly and
start menu unusable due graphic artifacts. I fixed it enabling
modesetting driver in Xorg [1].

Well I think that is all.
Regards.

[1] https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/4782

[Rusty Bird]

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donoban:

> 2) Btrfs installation seems too hard. After some tries I did an unbootable
> installation.

Did you create the btrfs partitions manually or did you use the
installer partitioning screen's "Click here to create them
automatically" button? The latter should work and I'd be very
interested if it somehow broke your system.

OTOH, manual btrfs partitioning in the installer was horrible last
time I tried.

Rusty
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[donoban]

On 8/25/19 4:22 PM, Rusty Bird wrote:
> donoban:
>> 2) Btrfs installation seems too hard. After some tries I did an unbootable
>> installation.
>
> Did you create the btrfs partitions manually or did you use the
> installer partitioning screen's "Click here to create them
> automatically" button? The latter should work and I'd be very
> interested if it somehow broke your system.
>
> OTOH, manual btrfs partitioning in the installer was horrible last
> time I tried.
>

I tried to do it automatically but it did not let me to select 'btrfs'
option, so I was force to try with manual setup. On manual mode I have
to unlock the luks hard disk (from the older installation) and I
remember this being problematic too so I ended manually recreating
partitions table from console. Then I am not sure what partitions I did,
but after finishing installation and rebooting it was unbootable.


I will boot again with the installer media and check if there is a
'btrfs' option.

[Rusty Bird]

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donoban:

> On 8/25/19 4:22 PM, Rusty Bird wrote:
> > donoban:
> > > 2) Btrfs installation seems too hard. After some tries I did an unbootable
> > > installation.
> >
> > Did you create the btrfs partitions manually or did you use the
> > installer partitioning screen's "Click here to create them
> > automatically" button?
>

> I tried to do it automatically but it did not let me to select 'btrfs'

> option, so I was force to try with manual setup. [...]

>
> I will boot again with the installer media and check if there is a 'btrfs'
> option.

Here are some screenshots of how to get automatic btrfs partitioning:
https://openqa.qubes-os.org/tests/3240 ("install_partitioning_btrfs"
is the relevant section.)

Rusty
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[donoban]

On 8/25/19 5:58 PM, Rusty Bird wrote:> Here are some screenshots of how

to get automatic btrfs partitioning:
> https://openqa.qubes-os.org/tests/3240 ("install_partitioning_btrfs"
> is the relevant section.)
>

Thanks Rusty, after checking the installation again and the test log I
think that my problem was the "Click here to create them automatically"
failed because my hard disk was already portioned and has no enough free
space so I ended using fully manual procedure, I am not sure if I
deleted my luks partition from there or I switched to a console and used
cfdisk. The "automatically" button failed so many times that when I
achieve to free space I didn't try it again. I think that I also tried
with "I would like to make additional space...", ouch I tested
everything except the right path :)

The problem is that getting there with a non empty hard disk can be
pretty confusing (although once you see the correct steps it seems quite
simple). Maybe some dialog saying "This hard disk already contains
partitions, do you want to create an empty partition table?"

[Rusty Bird]

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Hash: SHA512

donoban:

> On 8/25/19 5:58 PM, Rusty Bird wrote:> Here are some screenshots of how to
> get automatic btrfs partitioning:
> > https://openqa.qubes-os.org/tests/3240 ("install_partitioning_btrfs"
> > is the relevant section.)
>
> Thanks Rusty, after checking the installation again and the test log I think
> that my problem was the "Click here to create them automatically" failed
> because my hard disk was already portioned and has no enough free space so I
> ended using fully manual procedure, I am not sure if I deleted my luks
> partition from there or I switched to a console and used cfdisk. The
> "automatically" button failed so many times that when I achieve to free
> space I didn't try it again. I think that I also tried with "I would like to
> make additional space...", ouch I tested everything except the right path :)
>
> The problem is that getting there with a non empty hard disk can be pretty
> confusing

Definitely. Partitioning is my least favorite part of Anaconda (the
installer used by Fedora and hence Qubes).

> Maybe some dialog saying "This hard disk already contains partitions, do you
> want to create an empty partition table?"

If you have the time and inclination, you might want to submit this
suggestion to the Anaconda bug tracker - after verifying that the
latest Fedora installer has the same defect, which is their bug
submission policy IIRC.

Rusty
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