Qubes OS

Tips

Presentation Mode Mod

For added safety, automatically turn Presentation Mode off whenever the screen is locked (by hotkey or anything else that invokes the xflock4 script):

xfconf-query -c xfce4-session -p /general/LockCommand -n -t string -s ‘eval xfconf-query -c xfce4-power-manager -p /xfce4-power-manager/presentation-mode -s false; xscreensaver-command -lock’

Auto-starting an application

To auto-start an application on qube startup link the desktop file from /usr/share/applications to ~/.config/autostart

eg.

cd ~/.config/autostart

ln -s /usr/share/applications/mozilla-thunderbird.desktop .

Mounting USB drive/CD/DVD

Select the device (/dev/sda for example) in Qubes Devices to have its partitions auto-mounted in the selected qube. Or select a partition (/dev/sda2 for example) in which case you will have to manually mount the partition:

sudo fdisk -l # list available devices/partitions

sudo mount /dev/xvdi /mnt/removable

Writing a USB image to a USB drive

sudo dd if= of=/dev/xvdi status=progress bs=1048576 && sync

Better spell-checking with nano

Create the file ~/.nanorc containing the following line:

set speller "aspell -c"

Qubes volume revert

To display the number of revisions to keep and any available revisions for restoration

qvm-volume info vname:private

To set the number of revisions to keep to 2

qvm-volume config vname:private revisions_to_keep 2

To restore a revision

qvm-volume revert vname:private revision

Make files persistent in a template based VM

All these steps are carried out in the template based VM (not the template VM).

Make sure the directory /rw/config/qubes-bind-dirs.d exists.

sudo mkdir -p /rw/config/qubes-bind-dirs.d

Create a file /rw/config/qubes-bind-dirs.d/50_user.conf with root rights.

Edit the file 50_user.conf to append a folder or file name to the binds variable.

binds+=( '/var/lib/tor' )
binds+=( '/etc/tor' )

Reboot the VM.