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Egil Priskorn edited this page Sep 11, 2020 · 15 revisions

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I share my screen?

Currently this is a little hidden in the settings. Select "Desktop" as video source. See this video for how to set it up.

How do I start qTox without a password prompt?

Remove your password by clicking on the profile name, then clicking "remove password". Restart qTox and select "load automatically". Then qTox should start automatically.

Boxes instead of the text ("tofu")

If the text/emoticons are displayed as blank boxes (so called "tofu"), your system is missing fonts.

Download and install BotnetGoogle Noto Fonts to fix that.

Downloading 0.5 GB of fonts quite well explains why qTox can't just bundle all fonts required to properly support whole Unicode.

Can a profile be automatically loaded if it's password-protected?

Short answer: no.
Longer answer:

Password protection in qTox, as opposed to variety of other software that claims to be "secure" actually does provide fairly strong guarantees that your data is secure. If you're using a password, your data is encrypted before writing it to disk, and decrypted when you type in your password. Only person who knows the password can get to know what your data is.

So the guarantee is that as long as the only person knowing your password is you, your data is known only to you (but whatever text you've sent to your friends is also known to them ;P ).

Automatically loading an encrypted profile would require writing down the plaintext password somewhere on your disk, which would result in the guarantee being nullified – now the only requirement would be just having an access to the storage, which doesn't differ from having a non-encrypted profile. At which point having a password in the first place is unnecessary.

So if there's no difference between having a profile without password-protection and password-"protected" profile that has password written down somewhere, qTox does the only sane thing and simply doesn't offer a way to nullify strong guarantees about security.

If you want automatically loaded profile, it conflicts with security – you can't have both. Either explicitly remove the password (in which case you know well that there's no security to be expected), or keep the password and security it provides.

High-DPI support

There are some Qt docs on that, although if your qTox is built against an old Qt version (before 5.6) those might not apply/be helpful.

Docs:

How to merge two profiles of the same ID (synchronize contacts and history)?

Contacts sync: https://github.com/qTox/qTox/issues/3408

qTox couldn't open your chat logs, they will be disabled.

Most likely you're missing SQLite/SQLCipher dependencies.

Network usage

Network is being continuously used while I'm not doing anything, why?

qTox is P2P – it needs to search, connect to, and maintain the connection to the friends and other network nodes all the time in order to stay online. This generates network traffic. The more friends you have, the bigger network usage.

Networking is managed by toxcore library, and eventual improvements to qTox's network usage depend on toxcore development.

Why is qTox killing my internet connection?

tl;dr: Your network connection deserved to be killed.

Explanation: Sometimes you will have a router or some other network device which does not want to work well with qTox. In fact, it may outright refuse to work at all, “dying” at your hands.

<irungentoo> the routers dieing is caused by too many connections

<irungentoo> some idiotic routers treat one UDP packet sent to an ip/port as one connection

<irungentoo> and keep track of it

. .

<irungentoo> and the reason why hole punching doesn't work very well on newer routers

There isn't a lot that could be done about it, but there is a workaround - you can disable UDP in qTox and see whether it would help.

Support for other instant messaging protocols

Short answer: no.
Longer answer:

One of key things in making software secure is keeping attack surface as small as possible.

Supporting more than one IM protocol is opposite of that. It doesn't just enlarge attack surface, it adds entirely new (big!) attack surfaces.

Thus the simplest solution when it comes to security and supporting multiple protocols is simply: don't.

And qTox does just that: it doesn't support protocols other than Tox.

Supporting only one protocol allows full focus on it, which means that eventual problems are more likely to be found & fixed faster. Full focus on one protocol helps prevent bugs landing in code in the first place.

It's also good to keep in mind that interface exposed to qTox client by toxcore library is really nice (aka as idiot-proof as possible), which further lowers risk of something being done wrong. This is rarely (if ever) the case for other protocols.

Can I run multiple instances of qTox at once?

Yes, to open different profiles, run qtox -p profile-name to open a second instance and load profile-name. If you want one profile open with multiple windows, see https://github.com/qTox/qTox/blob/master/doc/user_manual_en.md#multi-window-mode