Sunday, April 20, 2014

Qubes OS R2 rc1 has been released!

Today we're releasing Qubes OS R2 rc1 (release candidate), which is expected to be the last milestone before the final Qubes OS R2 release. As mentioned previously today's release is bringing mainly UI improvements and polishing and lots of bugfixes, as well as some last new features: 
  • Both Dom0 and VMs have been upgraded to Fedora 20.
  • Support for full templates download via two new repo definitions: templates-itl and templates-community. With a bit of imagination we could call it Qubes “AppStore” for VMs :) Currently we have only published one template there – the new default fc20-based template, but we plan to upload more templates in the coming weeks (such as the community-produced Arch Linux and Debian templates). Even though we have a separate repo for community contributed templates, we still plan on building those templates ourselves, from (contributed) sources.
  • Support for running Windows AppVMs in “full desktop” mode with support for arbitrary window resizing (which automatically adjusts the resolution in the VMs).
  • Support for on-the-fly switching between the “full desktop” and “seamless” modes for Windows AppVMs.
The last two features require, of course, our proprietary Qubes Windows Tools to be installed in the Windows AppVMs to work, which new version we have also published to the new repositories for R2rc1.

We support smooth upgrading for current Qubes R2 Beta 3 users – the procedure is very simple, yet it will take some hours because of the Dom0 distro upgrading.

As can be seen in our ticketing system, there really are only few minor cosmetic tasks left before the final Qubes R2 release. It is expected that upgrade from today's release to the final R2 will be very simple and quick – just standard updates installation.

As usual, the detailed installation and upgrade instructions, as well as the HCL, can be found here. Note however, that the HCL for the today's release will take some days/weeks to compile, as we need to wait for reports from the community, and so for this time the HCL for the previous release (R2 Beta 3) should be used instead. It is reasonable to expect that the new HCL will be a subset of the previous one.

Also, as usual, please keep in mind that we don't control the servers from which the ISO is being served and so please always make sure to verify the digital signature on the downloaded ISO before installing it.

Please direct all the technical questions or comments regarding Qubes OS to our mailing lists.

Enjoy!

10 comments:

an alex said...

Great job, as always! You, ladies and gentlemen at the ITL, are doing an important thing, and please be sure that there are many who greatly appreciate your work.

Anonymous said...

This is really great news, I'm really looking forward to trying out the Debian template ;) (I am one of those poor folks who can't stand .rpm stuff)

Anonymous said...

Cool stuff! and really lots of kudos to you guys for making this in these days of less trust going around. I work in the oil industry developing systems and we need all the security we can get from industrial espionage and others.

For personal users there is a huge problem when there is no security nor any level of anonymity anymore - even though it's needed for any democracy. Sadly that seems the goal of so many companies who live off profiling people (Disqus, Google, MSFT, Facebook et al) - even genealogy DNA now with Anne Wojcicki and her 23andme company seemingly seeking to extend Google's reach into the biological markers.

Wayland suffers the same keylogger problems as does X11 - as mentioned on reddit and concept posted on github.

How does Qubes differ from LXC though? Particularly performance is always a concern, but ease of use with Docker using LXC also matter.

Cheers!

Joanna Rutkowska said...

http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2012/09/how-is-qubes-os-different-from.html

Anonymous said...

Will it be possible (in the future, maybe) to get an openSUSE-based (or any-other-distro-based) edition of Qubes OS ?

Joanna Rutkowska said...

@anon: not sure what you mean by: "openSUSE-based (or any-other-distro-based) edition of Qubes OS"?

Do you mean support for OpenSUSE or other distro template for VMs?

Multiple templates are already supported, some people already contributed template building scripts for archlinux, and the debian template is nearly ready also (see our qubes-devel mailing lists for details).

We've also introduced repos for such 3rd party templates (community-contributed) in the recent Qubes release, and so we will shortly be uploading such template all built and ready to use.

Anonymous said...

This is great news, may I suggest you to update the blog to announce when the Debian template is out? I think there is a large userbase waiting for that :)

Anonymous said...

Curious as to if we will ever see compatibility with Linux, OSX, and Windows apps. Have a Qubes version of Wine perhaps?

Anonymous said...

Any chance you could split the X magic you're using to get container windows/tray icons to display on the host X into a project by itself that people can use standalone on other distributions / priv separation setups?

Anonymous said...

For god's sake when will 2.0 final be out? Only 2 more tickets!