Install Immos

Boot the installer from a USB stick and click through the wizard. Prefer a terminal, or setting up a VM? Write the finished system image directly.

Before you start

Check three things:

The machine is 64-bit x86 and boots through UEFI. Legacy BIOS boot is not supported.
Secure Boot is disabled in firmware. Immos’s boot images are not signed with a key your firmware trusts yet.
The target disk is 32 GB or larger, and everything on it can go — the installer takes the whole disk.

Download the installer medium and its checksums from the download page, and verify what you downloaded — every release ships a SHA256SUMS manifest signed with the Immos release key:

immos ~$

$ gpg --verify SHA256SUMS.gpg SHA256SUMS
$ sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS --ignore-missing

Install with the wizard

Write the installer to a USB drive, boot the machine from it, and a live Plasma session starts with the installer open. The wizard runs language, a requirements check, the disk picker, your account choice, locale and keyboard, then writes the system:

The disk page erases the whole disk. There is no partition editor and no dual boot; disks under 32 GB are refused, and the layout is previewed before anything is written.
The accounts page is one choice: a local administrator, a managed system enrolled with a code, or an Active Directory join. See for organizations for what each means.
The install is writing, not computing. No packages are resolved and nothing is downloaded — the finished system image is copied to the disk, a swap partition sized to your memory is added so hibernation works, and the live session’s built-in account is removed.

The result is indistinguishable from any other Immos machine, and it updates through the same signed path from its first day.

USB write commands for Linux, Windows and macOS are on the download page.

Write the system image directly

The raw image skips the wizard entirely — it is the finished system, it boots wherever it is written, and it grows to fill whatever disk it lands on at first boot. This is the path for virtual machines, for carrying a persistent system on a USB stick, and for scripting installs.

The stick is a real system

What you write is not a live CD. It boots, saves your files, updates and rolls back like any installed machine — it simply happens to live on removable media.

Identify the drive carefully — this erases it — then decompress and write in a single pass:

immos ~$

$ lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,MODEL
$ zstd -dc immos_0.2.0.img.zst | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync

On Windows, decompress the .zst first, then write the .img with Rufus in DD Image mode or with balenaEtcher. On macOS, diskutil unmountDisk the target and dd to the /dev/rdiskN node.

To install to an internal disk this way, boot from the USB stick, write the same image to the internal disk, and reboot without the stick:

immos ~$

$ zstd -dc immos_0.2.0.img.zst | sudo dd of=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync

Two things the wizard does for you

A directly written disk keeps the factory layout: no swap partition, so no hibernation, and the built-in account the live image ships with is still there. Change its password on any machine you intend to keep, or add your own account and lock the built-in one out.

Run it in a virtual machine

The raw image boots in QEMU, VMware, Hyper-V and VirtualBox. Set the VM to UEFI firmware with Secure Boot off, give it 4 GB of RAM, and convert the raw image if your hypervisor needs its own format (qemu-img convert). The download page has a ready-made QEMU command line.

What happens next

On first boot the system claims the rest of the disk for your data, generates a machine ID and presents the login. See first boot for what to expect.