Answers is back! On p14
QI’ve just installed Qubes 3.2 and have updated it, yet I can’t seem to figure out how to play any video (from news stations, movies, DVDs). I realise special hardware is called for, but I have it all: my CPU is an Intel i7-2760QM running in an HP 8460p laptop, with SSD and 16GB RAM. I have 14 years of experience with Linux.
I use Linux Mint 18.3, and I have all the requirements for Qubes, but can’t seem to get video to work. I can’t download the Flash plugin and I don’t know much about HTML5. I don’t know how to install/extract Tar files. If you can help, thank you. If you can’t thanks anyway. I still plan to continue using Linux Mint – it does everything I ask of it. But Qubes does have many advantages. Stephen Wood, Via email
AQubes (as you’re no doubt aware) is focused on privacy and security. Applications are all run in separate Xen domains that can’t access each other and have limited access to the host’s hardware. So your multimedia applications can’t see your video card, only a virtual video device that painfully renders everything in software before passing the results to the host, which then throws it all at the real video card. Still, I’d expect playing local files (low-res ones at least) with something like VLC to work through software rendering, especially given the potency of your hardware. In fact, I’d expect streaming video from the web to work too, albeit with a bit of jitter and stutter. I haven’t played with Qubes for a while, and I don’t have an installation to hand (it doesn’t work well in a VM for obvious reasons), so this is just speculation. Which OS template are you using with Qubes? It could be a distro specific issue. Are there any relevant error messages? Google is your friend here.
There’s really no good reason to install the Flash plugin nowadays (especially if your motivation for using Qubes is security). Almost all sites now offer some kind of HTML5 video, and even DRM-protected content is supported out of the box in Firefox. It’s possible that you’re missing some library ( libav or ffmpeg) to make this work, but then we’d still need an explanation for DVDs and local files refusing to play on your laptop.
I’m reliably informed that we do have a privacy feature ( you’resupposedtobewriting itnow–Ed) coming up next issue, so hopefully I’ll get a chance to play with Qubes. I’ll be sure to include any tips on video playback if I come across something.
You can extract the contents of a tar file with tar xvf file.tar . Most tars are gzipped (or xz-ed or bz2-ed) to make them smaller, tar (tape archive) doesn’t do compression, so pass the archive to gunzip first do tar xvzf file.tar.gz . More details available via man tar . As an aside I’m slightly confused that you could go 14 years without having cause to do this. Obvious warning about installing unverified binaries instead of using a package manager.