Problems while installing Qubes-OS 3.2 on Sony Vaio Z: no hard drive encryption possible, Setup fails

[Hanno 'Rince' Wagner]

Hi,

a friend recommended QubesOS to me and I thought I'd try the latest
version of it. I'd like to share my experience and ask for help; I'll
have a summary of my questions at the end of the mail.

I like the idea, but I had some Problems:

right now, for testing purposes, I installed it on a USB Stick (HyperX
Savagge HXS3, USB3.0) which I put into the usb3-slot of my laptop. The
installation medium was a "normal" USB stick on the other usb-slot.
everything fine there. Install-Boot and testing of the install-USB-stick
went fine.

The installation itself took it's time (~3.5 hours) but that's ok. at
first, I wanted hard drive encryption, but when I rebooted this
installation, the kernel wasn't able to ask me for a passphrase to
decrypt the USB-Stick (it bootet the kernel, but then it waited at a
time, so I was stuck at that point). It didn't boot properly.

without usb drive encryption, the setup process worked fine after the
reboot until a specific point. I used only default parameter (so, no
default networking through tor). It configured the Default VMs but then
stopped with the following:

[‚/usr/bin/service‘, ‚qubes-netvm‘, ‚start‘] failed:
stdout: “”
stderr: “Redirecting to /bin/ssystemctl start qubes-netvm.service
Job for qubes-netvm.service failed because the control process exited
with
error code. See “systemctl status qubes-netvm.service” and “journalctl
–xe” for details.
“

my laptop never had network access while installing the system, so I am
not sure wether this is related.

then I decided the installation is done and it started up. I created a
user during the Installation, so I logged in. This worked, but I haven't
had no menu bar or something similar, at first only the VM-Manager.
Is this normal? In the screenshots I see at the bottom a menu bar with
more Information and I am missing this bar.

also, my laptop has one internal and one external ethernet adapter, one
Wifi-Adapter and one UMTS/LTE-Adapter. Apparently, right now I can only
see one internal adapter, but after a reboot I wasn't able to use the
Network at all from dom0; is this correct? I wanted to install htop to
see what my machine is doing.
which brings me to my final point: I have a fast machine with 8 cores
and 8GB RAM. But even without having much to do, dom0 shows a Load of
8-10, mostly doing something with pulseaudio. I can show a screenshot if
someone wants to see this.


My questions are:
- how can I enable hard drive encryption for that machine? can I enable
it later and not while Installation? maybe this works...
- why does the setup after the first reboot fail; is there a way to
debug what is going wrong there?
- how can I finish the setup? I fear that some steps are missing for
really using QubesOS then.

I have no problem in reinstalling the system, so if you have suggestions
what I can do, please tell me.


best regards,

Hanno