I recently got a demo unit of an HP Zbook Studio G3 to play with. It is a tricked out one with a 4k display and a NVMe drive. I wanted to try out Qubes OS on it, but the installer would lock up when I tried to boot it.
Getting Qubes to install and boot
The rough steps for getting a HP Zbook Studio G3 to install Qubes OS 3.2 are:
- Get a copy of the Qubes OS 3.2 ISO
- Write the ISO to a USB Drive
- Mount the EFI boot partition of the USB drive
- Windows will automatically mount it if you plug in the USB drive – a Mac won’t recognize it at all
- Modify the
EFI/BOOT/xen.cfgfile so that all of the kernel lines containacpi_osi=! acpi_osi="Windows 2009"- I found this useful tip on the ArchWiki
- Disable Secure Boot in the BIOS
- Boot the USB drive and run the install
- After the install completes reboot back off the USB drive into “Rescue a Qubes system”
- Let the recovery environment mount your install
- Run
setfont sun12x22so you don’t go blind - Modify
/mnt/sysimage/boot/efi/EFI/qubes/xen.cfgso that all of the kernel lines containacpi_osi=! acpi_osi="Windows 2009". The installer tries to but doesn’t do it quite right. - Do a
chroot /mnt/sysimageand runefibootmgr -v -c -L Qubes -l /EFI/qubes/xen.efi -d /dev/nvme0n1p1to work around an issue with the installer and NVMe drives - Your system should now be bootable and you can finish running through setup
Setting up the screen so you don’t go blind
Once you have the system up and running the default settings aren’t very friendly for a 4k display. I was able to get XFCE to use a bigger font dpi, but KDE seems to have better 4k display support. You should be able to follow the documentation, with one minor change. Make sure you also add -dpi 192 to the line you edit in /etc/sddm.conf.