[Announcement] Qubes Alpha 2 released!

[Joanna Rutkowska]

Finally, we're releasing Qubes Alpha 2!

There are lots of improvements compared to the Alpha 1 that we released
at the beginning of April (in random order):

* Audio virtualization from AppVMs (now, you can not only watch movies,
but also listen to them! How cool, eh? :)

* Graphical VM Manager

* Lots of bug fixes, specifically for GUI virtualization

* Backup/Restore/Migration tools

* Now uses Fedora 13 as a base for Dom0 (this results in newer Xorg
packages, so better graphics support, among other things)

* Dedicated KDE packages for Qubes (Some eye candy: VM labels are now
nicely drawn by the Window Manager, no more ugly hand-drawn rectangles!)

* New Dom0 kernel based on 2.6.34 kernel (this time we're testing a
xenlinux one). This kernel seems to support S3 suspend much better, as
well as have some newer graphics drivers, e.g. for Nouveau.

The obligatory new screenshots are here:
http://qubes-os.org/Screenshots.html

The *updated* installation guide is here:
https://www.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/InstallationGuide

Known issues:
* Suspend/resume is still highly experimental it might crash your
system, or lock up some of your VMs, or it might screw up time in your
VMs. Use at your own risk!

* We have had some problems with getting NetVM working with many network
cards. Perhaps this is because of our new Dom0 kernel, or perhaps
because of the buggy Linux drivers, that are not well tested under Xen
PV guests (where mfn === pfn assumption doesn't hold). We decided to
withhold the release of a NetVM for Alpha 2, until we can get it working
at satisfactory level. For now, you should use networking in Dom0.
Hopefully we will release a new NetVM before Black Hat Vegas, so those
of you have have VT-d enabled laptops could test it at a conference ;)

Please send your feedback to qubes-devel.

Cheers,
joanna.

[ben ben]

It seems that the *updated* installation guide has a little mistake:

2. Configure Qubes repository:

wget http://qubes-os.org/yum/qubes-r1-dom0.repo
mv qubes.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/

shoud be
wget http://qubes-os.org/yum/qubes-r1-dom0.repo
mv qubes-r1-dom0.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/

and if you have install Qubes Alpha 1, you should do this
rm /etc/yum.repos.d/qubes.repo

[Joanna Rutkowska]

On 07/05/10 05:09, ben ben wrote:
> It seems that the *updated* installation guide has a little mistake:
>
> 2. Configure Qubes repository:
>
> wget http://qubes-os.org/yum/qubes-r1-dom0.repo
> mv qubes.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/
>
> shoud be
> wget http://qubes-os.org/yum/qubes-r1-dom0.repo
> mv qubes-r1-dom0.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/
>

You're right, of course. Fixed, thank.

> and if you have install Qubes Alpha 1, you should do this
> rm /etc/yum.repos.d/qubes.repo
>

No, you should not try to install Alpha 2 on top of an already installed
Alpha 1. You should backup your VMs using the qvm-backup tool, then
reinstall everything from scratch!

joanna.