Qubes-OS 4, Creating usable minimal templates

My preferred Linux is currently Qubes-OS. One thing I do like is the minimal templates. You can create templates with just what you need in them and then create a Qube from them that doesn’t have a lot of extra pieces that you do not need. However creating a usable template from the released templates takes extra steps, that I kind of fumble around doing, so I will layout my process here.

• There is no way to clone or duplicate a template VM from the Qubes Manager, you have to do it from the dom0 command line. Note you do not need sudo:

[user@dom0 ~]$ qvm-clone fedora-27-minimal fedora-27-firefox

• First, the minimal template does not contain the Qubes password-less sudo and the policy kit. You need to start a shell for the template as root. Again, there is no GUI way to do this, you need to do this from a dom0 command line:

[user@dom0 ~]$ qvm-run -u root fedora-27-firefox xterm

• Now I can follow the recommendations from https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/fedora-minimal/. In the fedora-27-firefox terminal we started from the command line:

bash-4.4# dnf install qubes-core-agent-passwordless-root polkit

• I check to make sure that the generalized qubes-core-agent is installed

bash-4.4# dnf install qubes-core-agent

• I install some of my preferred packages

bash-4.4# dnf install gnome-keyring less pciutils psmisc
bash-4.4# dnf install pulseaudio-qubes
bash-4.4# dnf install qubes-core-agent-networking

• Now I install the packages that I made the new template for

bash-4.4# dnf install firefox

 

 

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