On Tuesday, February 13, 2018 at 5:54:01 AM UTC+1, SM wrote:
> Hi
>
> I installed qubes 4.0 rc-4 on my hp laptop the installation went perfectly
> fine. I rebooted after the installation was over, laptop boots into qubes and
> after a few lines passing by there is a blank screen endlessly.
>
> I am dual booting with windows. Is there anything that I need to modify I
> order for this to work correctly.
>
> Thanks
It's unlikely to be caused by Windows, just be sure you know what you do in
advance so you don't wipe your Windows install or make it unbootable. Also take
note, Qubes is less secure when using dual-boot, although if you have to
dual-boot, then Qubes is still worth it in terms of security, it's just "less"
secure than it could be, although the risk are typically exotic attacks, but in
the future they may become common attacks.
As for the black screen,
- It sounds a lot like a graphic driver issue, did Qubes 4 work on previous
versions?
- Does Qubes 3.2. work on this machine?
- Does other Linux/kernel's work on this machine?
- Did you check and make sure settings are correct in UEFI? Sometimes unobvious
settings, even graphic settings in UEFI, can cause boot issues for Qubes.
- Did you try change between UEFI/EFI and LegacyBIOS/Grub boot?'
- Does your laptop support Qubes minimum specifications? Do you get a lack of
hardware-support warning during early Qubes install? Do you have virtualization
on your Intel or AMD CPU/Motherboard? Is it enabled in UEFI?
If the graphic driver is bad, then you can try change it in Grub menu (assuming
you installed with Grub, which makes this easier to fix). As for which driver
to change into, I'm not sure, but there are people around here far, far more
knowledgable than I, so maybe wait for those and hope someone will post. You
can also find a lot of graphic boot fixes in other Linux discussions, try
google it up. If this is the fault, then it's not uniquely a Qubes issue, and
you can find a lot of topics on this on the internet. Meanwhile I can offer
some other work-arounds you can try.
Please read them all before picking one, one may be more attractive to try than
another.
- - - - -
One alternative is to try install RC-3 or RC-2 instead, these are direct
updateable to the same updates in RC-4. The reason they released new RC-x
versions, as far as I can tell, is only because of two reasons, first better
working out-of-the-box with fewer required updates to get things started, and
second and more importantly, boot issues and hardware support, for example like
these. Odds are that something was changed which might not work for your
hardware, so it's worth trying to see if you install RC-3 or RC-2.
Don't install RC-1, as noted here:
"As a consequence of the partition layout change, it will be necessary for
current 4.0-rc1 testers to perform a clean reinstall of 4.0-rc2 rather than
attempting to upgrade in-place."
https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2017/10/23/qubes-40-rc2/
But you can install RC-2, as noted here:
"Current users of Qubes 4.0-rc2 can upgrade in-place by downloading the latest
updates from the testing repositories in both dom0 and TemplateVMs."
https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2017/11/27/qubes-40-rc3/
And you can install RC-3, as noted here:
"Current users of Qubes 4.0-rc3 can upgrade in-place by downloading the latest
updates from the testing repositories in both dom0 and TemplateVMs. As
explained in QSB #37, Qubes 4.0-rc4 uses PVH instead of HVM for almost all VMs
without PCI devices by default as a security measure against Meltdown, and this
change will also be released as a patch for existing Qubes 4.0 installations in
the coming days. Therefore, current Qubes 4.0 users will benefit from this
change whether they upgrade in-place from a previous release candidate or
perform a clean installation of 4.0-rc4."
https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2018/01/31/qubes-40-rc4/
* * * *
Keep in mind to follow the link above in case you pick a RC-3 version to try,
to read up on any details, for example RC-3 to RC-4 has some upgrade details to
take note on.
- - - -
A third approach could be to take out the drive and install Qubes on another
machine, then update everything on the other machine, before putting it back in
your first machine again. This way you can often bypass issues that are later
fixed, or only occurring during install. Just make sure you trust your second
machines hardware, and remove any existing drives during install, and don't
install with UEFI/EFI on the second machine if you got existing UEFI/EFI
installs on it, it can sometimes be messy to restore UEFI/EFI paths, you may
loose these OS systems. Use LegacyBIOS/Grub install, it's much safer. I've
managed to install a good handful Qubes 4 systems using this approach, which
otherwise would not have worked despite hours of debugging. So this may be
worth a shot for you too.
- - - - -
Last approach I can think of right now, is to boot
