State of Arch Template?

[Johannes Graumann]

Gentlepeople,

I'm migrating an Arch setup to qubes (4.0). This is complicated by the
rel. bleeding edge nature of Arch and the resulting software version
incompatibility/unavailability.

Currently I try to move a Digikam Archiving setup (Arch 6.4.0-4,
Fedora-30 6.1.0-7, Debian-10 4:5.9) with smbnetfs mounted remote
archives (not even present in Fedora).

A current Arch template would help this much, but the repos contain no
such image for 4.0 and the qubes-builder doesn't even finish the
"setup" script for me.

What's the status of Arch support? Is is still being worked on?

Sincerely, Joh

[dhorf-hfre...@hashmail.org]

On Sat, Dec 28, 2019 at 04:03:12PM +0100, Johannes Graumann wrote:
> A current Arch template would help this much, but the repos contain no
> such image for 4.0 and the qubes-builder doesn't even finish the
> "setup" script for me.

> What's the status of Arch support? Is is still being worked on?

building an arch template through qubes-builder worked for me
without any effort/problems in the last days.

-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user 657775936 Dec 26 20:14 qubes-template-archlinux-4.0.1-201912261712.noarch.rpm

the resulting VM starts and looks ok/working on console, but didnt want
to run any gui apps, qvm-run calls were just hanging without any error.
didnt track that down since i didnt actualy want to use it, was just
a question similar to yours came up on freenode #qubes ...

i could probably walk you through the "building" part, but fixing
whatever needs fixing inside the arch template is out of scope for
me since i am not an arch user.

[Johannes Graumann]

On Sat, 2019-12-28 at 16:15 +0100, dhorf-hfre...@hashmail.org
wrote:

Many thanks. After religiously sticking with the `qubes-builder` part
of the online documentation I appear to have progressed further and
will report back ...

Joh

[Johannes Graumann]

On Sat, 2019-12-28 at 16:15 +0100, dhorf-hfre...@hashmail.org
wrote:

Can others coment on the state/usability of the template? @Olivier
Médoc ?

Sincerely, Joh

[Daniel Sanders]

Hi all,

I also built the ArchLinux template VM just a few days ago. The build process went well but nothing happened when I tried to launch applications from the ArchLinux VM.

I connected using the console to see what happens. So I ran the following command from dom0: "sudo xl console archlinux-tvm", then login as "root" with no password. I then ran "systemctl --failed" and noticed the "rw.mount" service had failed. Apparently it failed to mount /dev/xvdb on /rw because there was no filesystem on the block device (cf "blkid /dev/xvdb"). It expected an ext4 filesystem.

As a workaround I copied the private.img file form a debian-10 VM to the folder with the archlinux images in dom0. I was then able to start the VM and run applications from the menu as expected, and I have not noticed any other issue with this archlinux VM. I still have to manually the private.img file if I clone this VM.

So I still don't know the root cause of the issue (why the private.img image contains no ext4 filesystem) but I hope it will help its resolution.

[dhorf-hfre...@hashmail.org]

On Tue, Dec 31, 2019 at 02:53:57PM -0800, Daniel Sanders wrote:
> So I still don't know the root cause of the issue (why the private.img
> image contains no ext4 filesystem) but I hope it will help its resolution.

"private.img"? *cough*
(this means you are running qubes3 or a qubes4 with a seriously
off-default storage configuration? ;)

thank you for debugging this.
if you look closer at the "systemctl --failed" output, it mentions
qubes-mount-dirs.service failing.
if you run "systemctl status qubes-mount-dirs.service" you see
it complains about "/usr/lib/qubes/init/mount-dirs.sh" failing.
if you run /usr/lib/qubes/init/mount-dirs.sh by hand, it complains
about the "cmp" command not being found.
quick check, and yes, it is not installed.
so "pacman -S diffutils", restart template, TA-DAH.

now someone who understands arch needs to add diffutils to the
pkg-list for the arch builder plugin. :)
(thats very much not me, i had to google the "how to install a pkg
on arch" part...)

[dhorf-hfre...@hashmail.org]

> now someone who understands arch needs to add diffutils to the
> pkg-list for the arch builder plugin. :)

correction: someone already did, 5 days ago.

https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-builder-archlinux/commit/09a435fcc6bdcb19144d198ea20f7a27826c1d80

so it should be fixed for all new arch template builds.
and 5d+ old ones with the problem can be fixed by
"xl console archtpl", logging in as root, "pacman -S diffutils".