Editing packages when building Whonix-Qubes

Development
1

Hello, I’ve read a lot of whonix build documentation, but I can’t find anywhere how to edit the packages that will be installed during the build.

I would like to try to build a minimal whonix without some GUI programs.

Can you tell me where I can edit the list of programs or where I can read about it?

2

That is and very most likely will remain undocumented. Qubes-Whonix minimal templates aren’t offered, unsupported and neither planned.

Qubes builder is:

  • rather complicated to use,
  • last time I checked sparsely documented,
  • downloads package from the Qubes (and Qubes-Whonix) binary repository instead of building them during the template build process. What it means to build “from source” in context of a Linux distribution isn’t well defined. More on this point: Builds from Source Code versus Builds including Binary Packages

These issues are specific to Qubes and unspecific to Whonix.

Prerequisite skills:

  • How to build other templates using Qubes builder.
  • How to build Qubes-Whonix using Qubes builder.
  • How to set an environment or build config variable (that becomes an environment variable) in Qubes builder.

Once you know all of the prerequisite skills (which are unrelated to Whonix support), let me know.

Then the Qubes-Whonix specific part is by comparison rather simple. Hints:

3

I have some experience in building fedora and arch templates as well as qubes iso with xfce removed from it.

Thank you for the information, I will look into it and try to build a minimal whonix template to suit my needs

“Package: whonix-workstation-packages-recommended-gui”.

This is probably what I need.

4

Then you might have a good chance of doing this here too.

There are no separate Qubes-Whonix CLI / GUI packages or minimal / full.

For example for the workstation, it’s probably required to understand the following and emulate.

Some packages under Depends: are optional. Others might result in a template with broken functionality.

whonix_meta_package_to_install currently doesn’t support multiple space separated packages.

But that would be quite easy to support by removing the quotes here in the yellow marked line: