I’m convinced that the Librem 14 is the best laptop for Qubes and our customers seem to agree. Originally, customers who selected Qubes with their order would have to install it themselves with a USB thumb drive we added to the order. More recently we started offering Qubes as a pre-installed option, all set up on the computer before it ships. This required a number of changes to the Qubes OEM project Nitrokey created for their own use so that we could allow customers to reset their disk unlock passphrase on first boot.
Originally we shipped Qubes 4.0.4 and when Qubes 4.1 was released, many of our customers asked when we would switch to the newer version. Updating our OEM installer for Qubes 4.1 took a lot more effort than we expected, but we are happy to announce that our Qubes 4.1 OEM installer is now complete and we are starting to use it for new orders. This is a project I worked on personally, and in this blog post I’ll do a brief technical dive into what’s involved in making the Qubes OEM installer and why upgrading to Qubes 4.1 was more complicated than expected.
Read the rest of the post here:
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@Kyle_Rankin for my Librem 14 that I got in November, I want to 1) do a factory reset, 2) upgrade to Qubes 4.1, and 3) do an EC Update. In which order should I do these and where is the best documentation for all of these steps?
I realized when I was writing the post that we likely had quite a few customers in your position, so we are going to do a full video and blog post that documents the process of upgrading to 4.1.
The EC update is independent of that and something you can update following the docs here: https://docs.puri.sm/Librem_14/Maintenance/Embedded_Controler.html
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This is excellent news!
I just spent the last week kicking the tires on Qubes OS and decided to migrate my desktop to it–which in my case requires new hardware. (Qubes can’t even see any SATA devices on my current box–and yes, I made sure RAID wasn’t enabled–so I had to test drive it off of a Western Digital PassPort.)
I’ve got an old Librem13, v4 I think but don’t hold me to that (which still ticking nicely in spite of having been dropped onto the right rear corner once, which bent the case). I’m tempted to switch it over, but I am wondering how fast it would run. (Of course now I can do a “live” boot, but that WILL run slower than off the HDD/SDD)
I used a Librem 13v4 for my Qubes work computer (and a L13v1 as my personal computer) for a long time and it worked well enough. Obviously the Librem 14’s 6-core 12 thread CPU and 64GB max RAM is just a powerhouse for running Qubes, but if you give the Librem 13v4 a lot of RAM, and a fast NVMe disk, it should perform nicely.
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