Qubes 4.0 on a 13v2 with updated Coreboot?

Greetings Free Qubists,

I have a Librem 13v2 that was once running Qubes 3.2 but is currently running Debian because of security concerns in Qubes 3.2. Of course, I’m not entirely clear if Qubes 3.2 is more or less secure than the latest stable version of Debian - but that’s another issue.

I had Qubes 4.0 running on a Librem 15v3 machine and it was great. However, my 15v3 machine met an untimely demise and I can no longer use it (long story).

Back to my 13v2… when I attempted to install Qubes 4.0, I got an error telling me that the hardware wasn’t up to spec and that I should only continue if I was an “advanced” user. I wasn’t sure whether to consider myself ‘advanced’ so I aborted and opted for a standard distro (Pure OS is nice, but I had problems with managing non-free packages so I chose Debian).

Anyway, I was wondering how advanced I really need to be when it comes to running Qubes 4.0 on a 13v2. I think I might be more advanced than I give myself credit and I am always up for a reasonable challenge. I haven’t tried to install Qubes 4.0 since updating Coreboot - so that warning might not exist anymore.

tl;dr I would like to get back to using Qubes 4.0 and curious if that is possible on a 13v2 with updated Coreboot.

1 Like

it’s possible Qubes 4.0 reported that due to you running an older firmware version which didn’t fully support virtualization (notably, VT-d). Can you run dmidecode and check what firmware version you’re running? 4.8.1-Purism3 is the latest/current and has full virtualization support, shouldn’t generate any errors/warnings from Qubes

Earlier last year I purchased a Librem 13, which in the main, I am very happy with for any number of reasons.

However, I don’t care much for Gnome.

I would have very much liked to run Qubes, but when it failed to load, I gave up on it. Hunting for work-arounds weren’t worth the effort. So…

I’ve been a Mageia user (though all it’s various incarnations) for almost 20 years, and I’ve installed versions 5 & 6 on the 13. They both run flawlessly. Magiea gives one the option to block proprietary and third party KDE software at install time, and I’ve taken full advantage of that.

And live boot options are available via usb stick with Mageia as well.

Hey, I am running qubes on 13v2… I updated the bios/coreboot… build it manually on the pureos and then installed qubes from the usbstick… it seems to be working although sometimes I have issues with the net and the vms not starting … although i think its due to that I the first time accidentely configured twice the default setups of domains etc… so I did a reinstall and so far so good… although my killswitch seems not to work though.

My work laptop is a Librem 13v2 and I use Qubes 4.0 (well I guess 4.0.1 now). I suspect you got that warning because you are running an older version of coreboot before we updated it to support IOMMU. Like @MrChromebox suggests, if you follow our guide to update coreboot at https://puri.sm/coreboot/ you shouldn’t hit that warning again.