Booting the live image
The ISO is a complete system. Nothing is installed unless you ask for it, and no second drive is needed — the root filesystem is a compressed SquashFS image read off the disc, unioned with a RAM tmpfs.
Write it to a USB stick
The image is a hybrid ISO, so it can be written raw:
sha256sum -c anotheros-x86_64.iso.sha256
sudo dd if=anotheros-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress oflag=syncReplace /dev/sdX with the whole device, not a partition. Check the checksum
first — a truncated download produces boot failures that look like real bugs.
Boot it
The boot menu has a five-second timeout and defaults to squashfs root — Fasadas desktop. Both BIOS and UEFI work; on UEFI, disable Secure Boot, since the loader is not signed.
Useful alternatives in the menu:
- Install AnotherOS (console) — the text-mode installer.
- Safe graphics — software rendering, for hardware whose DRM driver is not yet happy.
- Serial console — output on
ttyS0, which is how most of this system was debugged.
Minimum hardware
x86_64 with 2 GB of RAM is comfortable; the whole userland lives in the image and the writable layer is memory, so more RAM means more room to work. A machine with 1 GB will boot to a console but will struggle with the desktop.
Remote access
The compositor has a VNC server built in, listening on TCP 5900, and it is on by default. On a machine with no working display driver that is often the quickest way in.
More documentation
- Installing to disk
- Packages and the filesystem
- How it boots
- The syscall ABI
- Hardware support
- ACPI
- UEFI boot entries
- NetBooting a Mac
- The AO toolkit
- Grafika — the graphics API
- The display protocol
- Desktop effects
- The level bezel
- Notifications
- Rastinis — the file manager
- File operations
- Audio — Garsas
- Hardware video decode
- Networking — Tinklas
- Network shares — SMB and NFS
- Remote control
- The Win32 subsystem
- DirectX and OpenGL for Win32 programs
- Ports and packaging