Fedora[edit]

Consideration for recommending Fedora as host operating system...

Website

• Looks much more friendly and modern.
• It is available over SSL.
• verification instructions ^[archive] are also available over SSL.
• gpg signing key is available over SSL.

Package Manager

• yum is safe as apt according to the theupdateframework.com people

Consideration for using it as Virtual Machine Guest

(i.e. for Whonix-Gateway ™ and Whonix-Workstation ™)

• Is there a tool to create virtual machine images like there is grml-debootstrap for Debian?
  • The feature set of grml-debootstrap seems to be a one-liner solution to getting a full working install.
  • Fedora supports kickstart files, which are the equivalent of Debian preseeding. It should conceivably not be too difficult to achieve a grml-deboostrap experience using kickstart files plus some minimal scripting (if one does not exist already). Fedora has automated builds for docker images.
• The more restrictive approach taken by SELinux (which is default in Fedora) might offer some security benefits.

In-Place Release Upgrades:

• Can be release upgraded in-place from one major release to another major release.^[1]

Release Cycle:

• Fedora has a relatively short life cycle: each version is usually supported for at least 13 months, where version X is supported only until 1 month after version X+2 is released and with approximately 6 months between most versions.

• Can Whonix ™ keep up with that?

Conflict of interest:

• Fedora won't really get stable since that would obsolete RHEL?

Package repository:

• Smaller than Debian?

apt-transport-tor:

• DNF equivalent is python3-dnf-plugin-torproxy.

Fedora doesn't seem to care about Reproducible Builds ^[archive].

Other stuff:

• Has not been considered yet.

• What would be particularly interesting is if Whonix ™ could provide a generalized set of scripts to set up the target environment in as much of a distro-agnostic way as possible (perhaps by leveraging Ansible, or similar). Making a working Fedora version in addition to Debian might be a start towards that. → Unrealistic. Would require a dedicated contributor. A port causes a huge amount of work.

• Also interesting would be a containerized version of the Whonix-Gateway ™ that could be easily deployed on a host OS (this provides less anonymity than what Whonix ™ is mainly aiming at, but has different use cases): For example, setting up an OnionPi-style hotspot. Current solutions, like the Adafruit OnionPi tutorial, are (1) not very easily deployable, (2) not as feature-full -- for example, limited to HTTP or particular protocols -- not full isolating proxies, and (3) tend to have a large footprint on the host/root OS -- ideally, one Raspi could be used both for providing a Tor Hotspot and for numerous other functions, with the Tor hotspot functions contained in one LXC and using only a handful of ports and hardware interfaces from the host OS. → Same as above.

Debugging Scriptlets[edit]

1) Add the prerun scriptlet to a file by running the following command (credit^[2]):

rpm -q --queryformat '%{PREUN}\n' qubes-template-whonix-gw-experimental > ~/qubes-template-whonix-gw-experimental.preun

2) Run that script as root while having errexit, xtrace enabled and output exit code:

sudo sh -ex ~/qubes-template-whonix-gw-experimental.preun 0 ; echo $?

Trivia:
The file name qubes-template-whonix-gw-experimental.preun actually doesn't matter. You could use a shorter file name.

misc[edit]

sudo yum langinstall de

Requires newer yum. So at the moment the easiest is using a Fedora based VM as UpdateVM.

sudo qubes-dom0-update langinstall de

Issues[edit]

phone home issue (says closed but is unfixed):

https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/1814 ^[archive]

Footnotes[edit]

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