Qubes OS 4.0 second candidate (rc2) has been released!

[Marek Marczykowski-Górecki]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Hello,

We have just released Qubes 4.0-rc2:

https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2017/10/23/qubes-40-rc2/

- --
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2

iQEcBAEBCAAGBQJZ7qEQAAoJENuP0xzK19csfcsH/3z/p92uLx9e7tvLkjp0KFxl
k4Dz2IG3WYWsPV7ddVqQEcqsuDwpoJFn5hPWlW5nCDALoXnyMWTxJbpmU+372MiQ
IO6kWqOQWkAi1YxCQFbJQh6wtKFxtFqbObALfzOPIUxc3LGR630qk/Xoc1b0CzHm
frq6o4ovbTJ7yz2sluhvk77pFz4dy8DVHmv6gi+YvrcsiC6MJovaqMPs8Xds7yPZ
Q0ERU3QGFVRXyzOJXIrC58zVHVh3QvZvedJlpwVrGj+65Eira9T5cdqW+quieaT0
iMkc1YnpjbcUo5KtkKY7A9IVMd75sE0RrRu7Ruh/0mH84UWuqylGORXtBRqoq2k=
=eTdP
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

[Roy Bernat]

Hi

is it possible to update from rc1 to rc2 ?
i tried to install whonix with no success.

ideas ?

Roy

[Johannes Graumann]

Follow the link and thou shall find "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. We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience."

Joh

[[799]]

Hello Roy,

>> Hi is it possible to update from rc1 to rc2 ?

It's all in the news ;-)

=> https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2017/10/23/qubes-40-rc2/

"[...] 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. [...]"

Regards

[799]

[David Hobach]

Frankly I considered that a rather bad joke, but probably there wasn't
enough time to provide a tested upgrade path & the number of rc1 users
is likely to be too low to make it relevant.

If you have a closer look at the bug apparently preventing an upgrade
path [1], you'll notice that just the partition layout of all template
VMs was changed to have the root fs at the end instead of the beginning.

So I guess it should be relatively straightforward to upgrade with one
of the following ideas:

(Warning: I didn't test any of that and it might be entirely wrong:)

1. Re-install your template VM, if you're only using a standard one.
Unfortunately the easy way doesn't work anymore [2], but
qubes-dom0-update should still download the rpm to dom0, so that you can
just use dnf to reinstall it. You'll of course lose all template
modifications.

2. Upgrade your templates to rc2 (make sure to keep some AppVMs running
in case you need them), then do an offline re-partitioning of your
template VMs (a 5-10 line script with losetup, fdisk & dd should
suffice) either in dom0 or in a running AppVM, if you don't want your
template VMs' file systems to be read inside dom0.
Then upgrade dom0 & restart.

Make sure you have a backup before testing any of these though... I'm
also not 100% sure how to convince qubes-dom0-update to use the rc2
repos in rc1.

KR
David

[1] https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/3173
[2] https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/3169

[David Hobach]

> 2. Upgrade your templates to rc2 (make sure to keep some AppVMs running
> in case you need them), then do an offline re-partitioning of your
> template VMs (a 5-10 line script with losetup, fdisk & dd should
> suffice) either in dom0 or in a running AppVM, if you don't want your
> template VMs' file systems to be read inside dom0.
> Then upgrade dom0 & restart.

I tested that one and it seems to work.
(I think I was on rc2 even before knowing it...)

I also noticed:
- There are no additional repos for rc2, i.e. a straightforward rc1 dom0
update & template update should suffice.
- rc1 partitioned templates also work in rc2. That may of course change.
I guess they use the uuid so that partitioning doesn't really matter as
long as you don't want to resize the image.
- Other than that losetup, sfdisk & dd seem to do the trick.

> Make sure you have a backup before testing any of these though... Yes, at least make a copy of the original template root.img...