MacBook Air 2012 and that ol' Broadcom chip

[stephen...@gmail.com]

After some trials and then some tribulations, I've finally got Qubes bootable on a MacBook Air. Once I get the whole thing workable, I'll do a bit of a write up to, hopefully, help others. My current hang up is the ol' Broadcom chip freaking out Qubes whenever my netvm tries to use it. The go-to for most folks seems to be following the instructions at:

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/assigning-devices/

I've gone through it and starting up the NetVM doesn't cause a hang now. What I get is "device not ready (firmware missing)".

My first question is, should I be hunting for the drivers from Fedora? Or elsewhere?

And more importantly, total new guy question, should these drivers be installed into dom0 or the NetVM's domU space?

Thanks in advance, Qubes Community.

[stephen...@gmail.com]

Scratch all that. I trashed the net-vm that I made (I'm doing them by hand due to the Broadcom chip freaking things out a bit on the install) and recreated the net-vm with Fedora instead of Debian. Works like a champ. I'll hit you all up later with a HCL report and a run down of my time with this machine and Qubes.

[qubes...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, 15 June 2016 03:19:47 UTC+7, stephen...@gmail.com wrote:
> Scratch all that. I trashed the net-vm that I made (I'm doing them by hand due to the Broadcom chip freaking things out a bit on the install) and recreated the net-vm with Fedora instead of Debian. Works like a champ. I'll hit you all up later with a HCL report and a run down of my time with this machine and Qubes.

Congrats on the install. I for one would be really interested in a step-by-step description of what you did to get it working. Although not quite the same, I have an old MacBook Pro on which I'd like to install Qubes! :-)

[stephen...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, June 15, 2016 at 4:18:44 AM UTC-4, qubes...@gmail.com wrote:
> Congrats on the install. I for one would be really interested in a step-by-step description of what you did to get it working. Although not quite the same, I have an old MacBook Pro on which I'd like to install Qubes! :-)

As I'm still trying to go through different things to get a better write up for the post with the HCL (and getting the HCL report to run- it's not outputting files, for some reason), I'll give the Q&D.

I'm uncertain if I made things easier or harder on myself by wanting the machine to single boot Qubes, no OS X. My first go at this machine a few weeks ago, I was attempting to dual boot, and was able to get past the installation step, but failed at a point during Qubes setting itself up on first boot, which I was able to overcome in this go around by checking the box that says, "Don't setup anything at all- I got this,"

* Create USB installer

* Create rEFInd USB stick

* Use Recovery Partition on Mac to erase drive. Working under the presumption that Qubes didn't support UEFI (which I later found out is not true, although the Apple implementation of UEFI seems to have had a bit of shade thrown at it), I formatted the drive MBR and FAT, one partition.

* Attached the rEFInd USB stick, and held down the alt key, and booted from it. It was the only option.

* Once the rEFInd booted, I then connected the Qubes installer USB drive to the other USB port. Refreshed. Here came the first round of headaches. rEFInd gives about four choices for booting the Qubes installer, "vmlinuz from ANACONDA", "xen.efi from ANACONDA", "Legacy something something". Apologizes for not having the specific texts, but three of the four would not permit a successful boot into the installer. The one that worked for me was something to the effect of "Legacy fallback whole disk" (the choice was all the way on the right). Initially I had not chosen this one because I had thought it was referring to the hard drive in the computer which had no OS on it at all. This is the one that worked.

* Once booted into the installer, I reclaimed all the space on the drive and left everything else at defaults. Started it installing, made myself some tea.

* There are guides that explain how to fix up the Broadcom stuff at this point, I ignored all of them and probably caused myself more headaches by doing so.

* On first boot Qubues goes through it's setups. The first time through, I left all the defaults, somewhere when it's starting up the networking stuff, it locks up and then refuses to boot up properly from there on out. There is /probably/ a way of fixing this, but I just went back a few steps, erased the drive, reinstalled Qubes.

* This time, I went with the advanced option and asked Qubes to not setup anything automatically for me. I did this to avoid it setting up the net-vm, which freaks out with the Broadcom chip in the computer. The biggest problem with this is that it doesn't setup any of the default VMs for you, and that's a /really/ nice thing.

* Once into the booted operating system, I followed the "Assigning Devices" page on Qubes's website: https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/assigning-devices/

* I spent a bunch of time on that, until finally, I (as mentioned in previous message) trashed the net-vm which was running from the Debian template and re-created it using the Fedora template and the kernel in there knows how to talk Broadcom.

* After all that, time to start making VMs.

tl;dr

* Booted USB installer from USB rEFInd drive, skipped the automatic setup and used Fedora as the template for my net-vm.

[qubes...@gmail.com]

Thank you *so* much for taking the time to write everything down in such detail. There is a lot for me to go through (I should probably read the Broadcom stuff that you ignored!), and I am going to try and find time this weekend to have a bash at it.

I'm really excited at the prospect of being able to see what's going on when running Qubes (I'm currently running it on a desktop machine + 4K screen I bought just for Qubes use, but the fonts in Menus / Terminal are so tiny it gives me a headache - and trying to adapt to Linux / Xen / Qubes after OS X is already enough of a challenge without that!)

Anyway, very grateful to you for your time, and for sharing your experience - I will attempt to replicate (more or less!) exactly! :-)

QC

[stephen...@gmail.com]

> Thank you *so* much for taking the time to write everything down in such detail. There is a lot for me to go through (I should probably read the Broadcom stuff that you ignored!), and I am going to try and find time this weekend to have a bash at it.

I'll try to keep an eye on the thread this weekend, so if something comes up, I'll try to lend a hand. Although it sounds like you're a bit ahead of me in the Qubes experience. I have a computer owned by my employer that I installed on as an academic experiment, but have no actual workplace use for it, I haven't done much with it.

The MacBook Air is pretty nice to play around with, but, boy, Qubes is memory hungry. 4GB is not a lot of RAM to play around with. AS much as I hate Purism's hyperbolic Twitter marketing, my next machine will probably be one of theirs and with as much RAM as I can afford.

So- let me know if I can lend a hand.

[qubes...@gmail.com]

Again, I'm really grateful to you, for your feedback and for offering to help out in case of difficulties. Sadly, I wasn't able to get to it today, and have had a frustrating day with OPNsense, OpenVPN and FreeNAS, in between trying to do some actual work! Ho hum, perhaps tomorrow, although 3.2RC now beckons, too!. Anyway, just wanted to say thank you *very* much, I really do appreciate it. :-)