Fedora 18 based dom0

[Marek Marczykowski]

Hi all,

We've almost finished major software upgrade in dom0. Now it will be based on
Fedora 18 (instead of 13). The biggest difference from the user PoV is window
manager - KDE is upgraded to 4.9. Fedora 18 also ships new installer (which
have much better architecture, but still some features not complete - like
mouseless install or resizing existing partitions).
And now we begin to officially support Xfce (4.10).

At the same time VM template also was upgraded to Fedora 18, but there is much
less differences.

All of it will be included in nearest R2-beta release, but if one want to test
it now it can be built using Qubes Builder [1] with attached config file.
Note that now it requires rpmdevtools installed in addition to other Qubes
Builder requirements.

Currently there is no way to direct upgrade, only
backup+reinstall+backup-restore. Also yum repositories for dom0 still contains
packages for R2-Beta1 system (Fedora 13 based), so qubes-dom0-update tool can
give errors for some packages (especially Qubes specific ones).

[1] http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/QubesBuilder

--
Best Regards / Pozdrawiam,
Marek Marczykowski
Invisible Things Lab

[Alex Dubois]

Great, thanks a lot for this effort, it may allow me to use it with some hardware with which I today have issues (macbookpro keyboard).

Question on the vm backup restaure... Do we still have to migrate the VMs or the upgraded template should do quite a bit to us...


Again, thanks for this great project.

Alex

> <fc18-builder.conf>

[Marek Marczykowski]

On 16.02.2013 17:46, Alex Dubois wrote:
> Great, thanks a lot for this effort, it may allow me to use it with some hardware with which I today have issues (macbookpro keyboard).
>
> Question on the vm backup restaure... Do we still have to migrate the VMs or the upgraded template should do quite a bit to us...

During restore use --replace-template option:
http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/Dom0Tools/QvmBackupRestore

[Dario Faggioli]

On ven, 2013-02-15 at 14:42 +0100, Marek Marczykowski wrote:
> And now we begin to officially support Xfce (4.10).
>

As I deeply hate KDE, this is a super-cool news! :-)

> At the same time VM template also was upgraded to Fedora 18, but there is much
> less differences.
>

> [...]

>
> Currently there is no way to direct upgrade, only
> backup+reinstall+backup-restore. Also yum repositories for dom0 still contains
> packages for R2-Beta1 system (Fedora 13 based), so qubes-dom0-update tool can
> give errors for some packages (especially Qubes specific ones).
>

But will it be possible to update at some point? I mean, if I have Qubes
R1 installed, will I, at some point, be able to upgrade it to R2 without
reinstalling, or is reinstalling going to be the only possible method
for getting these new stuff?

Regards,
Dario

--
<<This happens because I choose it to happen!>> (Raistlin Majere)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Dario Faggioli, Ph.D, http://about.me/dario.faggioli
Senior Software Engineer, Citrix Systems R&D Ltd., Cambridge (UK)

[Marek Marczykowski]

On 19.02.2013 00:26, Dario Faggioli wrote:
> On ven, 2013-02-15 at 14:42 +0100, Marek Marczykowski wrote:
>> And now we begin to officially support Xfce (4.10).
>>
> As I deeply hate KDE, this is a super-cool news! :-)
>
>> At the same time VM template also was upgraded to Fedora 18, but there is much
>> less differences.
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> Currently there is no way to direct upgrade, only
>> backup+reinstall+backup-restore. Also yum repositories for dom0 still contains
>> packages for R2-Beta1 system (Fedora 13 based), so qubes-dom0-update tool can
>> give errors for some packages (especially Qubes specific ones).
>>
> But will it be possible to update at some point? I mean, if I have Qubes
> R1 installed, will I, at some point, be able to upgrade it to R2 without
> reinstalling, or is reinstalling going to be the only possible method
> for getting these new stuff?

Short answer: yes, upgrade support is planned.

Details:
I've managed to upgrade system with multi-stage yum update and some manual
hacks... I'll write some tool to reply this operation, but still preferred way
is reinstall. Backup+restore preserves all the user files and settings so it
isn't that bad.

[Dario Faggioli]

On Tue, 2013-02-19 at 00:42 +0100, Marek Marczykowski wrote:
> > But will it be possible to update at some point? I mean, if I have Qubes
> > R1 installed, will I, at some point, be able to upgrade it to R2 without
> > reinstalling, or is reinstalling going to be the only possible method
> > for getting these new stuff?
>
> Short answer: yes, upgrade support is planned.
>

Ok, thanks. :-)

> Details:
> I've managed to upgrade system with multi-stage yum update and some manual
> hacks... I'll write some tool to reply this operation, but still preferred way
> is reinstall. Backup+restore preserves all the user files and settings so it
> isn't that bad.
>

Yeah, I agree. Moreover, I'm still trying Qubes out, so it definitely
works for m, since I don't have that much to backup!

I'll see whether trying the update way or wait for the next R2-beta (as
R1 was giving me troubles) and try installing it from scratch.

Thanks again and Regards,