Status of Archlinux template

[Damon Gant]

I've been trying to get the Arch template running following the guide at
https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/archlinux/ on a brand new
install.

I can get it to a point where the VM boots and I can spawn xterm, but
pretty much everything else is broken.

- /etc/pacman.d/*.conf is not included from pacman.conf. This breaks the
custom repo and updating over the proxy.
- fixing that, the GPG key is not imported to the pacman keychain by
default
- updating over proxy is still broken, but custom repo works at this
point
- the qubes guest tools that come with the image are a higher version
than those available from repos
- upgrades are impossible due to pulseaudio and xorg version conflicts;
yes that's a known issue, but suspect to me because pacman tries to
downgrade

Can anyone confirm this is broken or working for them, or even maybe got
an idea what's wrong?

[Franz]

Yes, I too stopped on pulseaudio and xorg version conflicts. Also I have seen an other thread alerting on problems with Qubes inter-VM copy/move tools.

So I suppose it is better to wait for Qubes 4 which changes from pv to hvm. Is it worth to make a lot of efforts, when a radical change is so close? Possibly a hvm will deal much easily with these problems.

Best

Fran

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[Graumann, Johannes]

On 2017-06-04 09:57, Franz wrote:

On Thu, Jun 1, 2017 at 12:10 PM, Damon Gant <m...@damongant.de> wrote:

I've been trying to get the Arch template running following the guide at https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/archlinux/ on a brand new install.

I can get it to a point where the VM boots and I can spawn xterm, but pretty much everything else is broken.

- /etc/pacman.d/*.conf is not included from pacman.conf. This breaks the custom repo and updating over the proxy.
- fixing that, the GPG key is not imported to the pacman keychain by default
- updating over proxy is still broken, but custom repo works at this point
- the qubes guest tools that come with the image are a higher version than those available from repos
- upgrades are impossible due to pulseaudio and xorg version conflicts; yes that's a known issue, but suspect to me because pacman tries to downgrade

Can anyone confirm this is broken or working for them, or even maybe got an idea what's wrong?

 

Yes, I too stopped on pulseaudio and xorg version conflicts. Also I have seen an other thread alerting on problems with Qubes inter-VM copy/move tools.

So I suppose it is better to wait for Qubes 4 which changes from pv to hvm. Is it worth to make a lot of efforts, when a radical change is so close? Possibly a hvm will deal much easily with these problems.

Best

Fran

Just add the following lines to /etc/pacman.conf in the template:

> IgnorePkg = libpulse
> IgnorePkg = pulseaudio
> gnorePkg = xf86-input-*
> IgnorePkg = xorg-server

afterwards "pacman -Syu" should work.

For me that call also appears to work after setting the environmental variables http_proxy/https_proxy to http://10.137.255.254:8082/

The only missing part for me know are the tools to copy between VMs AND (important to me) the qvm-usb proxy functionality ... how to get that fixed?

Joh

 

[Olivier Médoc]

Hello,

The archlinux template does not point to the right custom repository.

Here is my current /etc/pacman.d/99-qubes-repository-3.2.conf :
[qubes-r3.2]
Server = http://olivier.medoc.free.fr/archlinux/current/

As you suggested, you first need to include /etc/pacman.d/*.conf in
pacman.conf (this is also broken is the currently binary template).

Adding the custom GPG key must be done to make the custom repository
working properly (as described in
https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/archlinux/)

After that, a template update through pacman -Suy should work properly
for Qubes 3.2 (the built packages versions are qubes-vm-core 3.2.15-11
and qubes-vm-gui 3.2.13-7).

I think we should either update
https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/archlinux/ to document how to
update the broken template or build and distribute a new template.

To summarize:
- /etc/pacman.d/*.conf must be included manually from the initial template
- /etc/pacman.d/99-qubes-repository-3.2.conf should be modified to point
the the right custom repo (it will be probably better if I link the old
repository to the new one)
- the custom GPG key must be enabled in order to install packages from
the qubes-r3.2 repository
- updating over the proxy should work as soon as the qubes packages are
updated (the firewall need to be disabled for the initial update)
- there are currently no xorg or pulseaudio conflicts (at least with the
custom repository packages)
- copying between appvms work with the last packages (at least for me)
- I never tested archlinux as an usbvm, but it worked in the past for
mass storage (I'm not sure if the input proxy is working properly). I
will test this as soon as I have some time.

Thanks for your feedback anyway,

Olivier Médoc

[Adi Carlisle]

can the build guide be updated for the arch template, doesn't have to be specific to 4.0.1 but i think the keys are out of date