qubes

This is an update to an earlier post. Thanks to contributions on this thread and related bugfix. The Qubes operating system aims to be reasonably secure through isolation. One example of isolation: one virtual machine (“Qube”) runs the windowing environment, while other VMs run applications, which are displayed in that environment. This separation from the X11 environment means that an application, like skype or bluejeans, cannot share the screen. This is by design, and highlights the security that makes me a fan of Qubes.

I’m fortunate to be spending this week at Recurse Center, a fantastic “coder retreat” in Manhattan. Highly recommended! My goals for this short stay are: (a) dust off some coding skills that started to grow rusty, and (b) become more fluent in my favorite software language. To those ends, I’ve put together a set of tools that construct, sign and submit Ripple Consensus Ledger (RCL) transactions. There’s a reason I explicitly list construct, sign, and submit.

Qubes has recently published a release canditate for version 4.0. I’m upgrading my system, and taking some notes as I go… Users of Qubes know that template VMs tend to lag behind the latest release of an OS. As I write, for example, a Qubes template is based on Fedora 26, while Fedora 27 was released almost 3 months ago. I mention this not to fault the Qubes team, who do great work.