Text-based install inevitably failing on my ASUS GL552VW

[yessi...@gmail.com]

Hello, I tried to install qubes on my ROG laptop a couple months ago and didn't get very far. These last couple of days, I've decided to re-tackle the issue because I am really interested in using this OS. This time, I managed to get a little further on understanding the issue I've been having but I do need help to continue.

So, I'm using a usb flash drive as my installation source. Whenever I boot from my usb, I'm greeted with the ususal installation menu with all the features it normally should have. Whenever I try to install qubes on my system, the graphical menu tries to load and I can see the Qubes logo on the light blue background for a split second, before it disappears and I continue on the text install menu. No matter what I do, I end up with this error :

"Encryption requested for LUKS device sda2 but no encryption key specified for this device."

Before the installer stops and I have to restart my pc. After reading up a little bit on the subject, it seems like the text installer simply doesnt allow you to input the encryption key you want to use, so it inevitably fails. It seems like this might be due to incompatibility with my GTX 960M card, where my system attempts to use it but fails because Qubes is incompatible with it. What should I do? Something I do know is I could force my system to use intel graphics, but my BIOS doesn't let me do that anywhere, and I'm scared of flashing another BIOS, screwing things up and bricking my expensive device.

So anyway, thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to reply, and regardless I hope you have a nice day.

[Mike Keehan]

I had to use EFI to boot the usb stick on my machine - the legacy
bios boot always ended up in the text installer.

Mike.

[Mike Freemon]

Although your hardware is not the same as mine[1], they might be close
enough that these comments are helpful.

Like Keehan, I also found that the BIOS compatibility boot did not work
on my hardware.

The problem is a X startup failure, specifically, "no such file or
directory" for /dev/dri/card0. My VGA controller is an Intel 5916. No
kernel module was loaded for it, thus the error. And so the installer
dropped into text mode.

I, like you, found that the text installer does not work, for the reason
you have already found (unable to specify an encryption key). I did not
pursue that any further.

My hardware presents two UEFI menu items for the installation USB drive,
one with "Partition 1" and one without.

First, I tried the one without "Partition 1". The system went into a
"menu loop", i.e. the menu of "Test media...", "Install Qubes 3.2",
"Troubleshoot...", "Rescue..." would just reappear after selecting
"Install Qubes 3.2". I could not get past it.

So then I UEFI booted using the "Partition1" menu option of the USB
install drive. Success.

But the touchpad was not working (e.g. no mouse). I had to plug in a
USB mouse.

And.. the resolution on the laptop display was only 800x600 (native is
1920x1080).

Also, the wifi networking did not "just work". Specifically, I had to
manually launch the network manager nm-applet, and create a wiki
connection definition. Not a big deal once I realized that's all it
was, but it was a little unexpected.

The touchpad and screen resolution problems were not resolved until I
upgraded to the latest (at the time) unstable kernel. From my earlier post:

> The short version: The display issues were caused by using a kernel
that is "too old" (for this hardware).
>
> This hardware requires kernel 4.8.12 (to be more precise, all I can
say at the moment is that the minimum kernel version for this hardware
is > 4.4.55 and <= 4.8.12).
>
> Kernel 4.8.12 is only available from the unstable repository, so I
> had
to get Qubes installed in a "degraded" way before I could issue the
magic command:
>
> qubes-dom0-update --enablerepo=qubes-dom0-unstable kernel
> kernel-qubes-vm

One thing for you to watch out for is the nVidia and (if you have it,
which I think you do) the nVidia Optimus stuff. That might potentially
create some fun for you.


[1]
https://groups.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/qubes-users/BUe4tFfERtA/buazJHIzCQAJ

[yessi...@gmail.com]

Thanks for your help. I enabled UEFI, or at least, I think I did, because I enabled "fast boot" but if I tried to enable "secure boot" the qubes installer would tell me to disable it. I also made sure the BIOS was referring to the "partition 1" of my usb device (it already was). Enabling UEFI seemed to do more bad than good, since now the qubes installer doesnt even have the blue background and it's just grey letters on a black background. It still tossed me to the text installer which worked as expected (of course, I couldn't set the encryption password because the devs probably didn't code that into the text installer in the first place). All of this would be much simpler if only the devs would fix the text installer, but this error has been reported by users since at least Qubes 2.0 so I guess it's not that simple.

But I don't understand. Did graphics simply (partially) work for you after enabling UEFI? Because that didn't do the trick for me. I know that on windows I can select to use my intel graphics instead of my GPU, but I can't do that on the BIOS in order to force qubes to use it. Hell, I'm not even sure which graphics processor is it that Qubes is trying to use, so I don't even know whether somehow forcing my pc to use the integrated graphics would fix it, or if neither of them work with Qubes.

Also, I tried the method described in this old post https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/qubes-users/-9qRHSkwfy8/CCx08nnTVEAJ
It shows me I can use a kickstart file to manually set up the installation settings before booting. It appeared to work at first but my PC froze when the bar got to 100%, and my ventilation fans started freaking out as if the processor was running at full steam. But come to think of it, I think I'll look more into this technique to see if it works. If anything, it's the only real fix I've seen for the text installer issue.