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Installing Eight.ly OS

Eight.ly OS is a full appliance operating system — you install it onto bare metal (or a VM) and it becomes the whole machine, the way Unraid, TrueNAS, or Proxmox do. Booting the installer image is the only way to install it. There's no package, no script, and no container version of Eight.ly OS itself. This page covers how to get the installer onto a machine and what happens the first time it boots.

What the image is

The installer builds on a Debian 13 (trixie) base with a Debian-signed kernel (7.x series). Because the kernel and bootloader are signed by Debian, the OS boots cleanly under UEFI Secure Boot through the full signed chain:

shimx64.efi (Microsoft-signed) → grubx64.efi (Debian-signed) → signed kernel

Everything an appliance needs is baked into the image — Docker, libvirt/QEMU, LXC, MergerFS, SnapRAID, Samba, NFS, Ollama, and the Eight.ly OS binary and dashboard. Nova's AI models are pre-staged onto the install target, so Nova answers questions the moment you reach the dashboard with zero downloads at first boot.

The installer image ships for 64-bit x86 (amd64). Eight.ly OS also runs on arm64 hardware — see Supported platforms for the current state of that build.

Two ways to boot the installer

Path Best for Secure Boot
Netboot Installing several machines, or headless boxes with no USB access Yes — full signed chain
USB / ISO A single machine you can plug a USB stick into, or iDRAC/IPMI virtual media Yes — signed shim chain

Whichever path you boot from, you land in the same on-screen installer wizard. The only difference is how the machine loads the live installer.

Option 1: Netboot (fleets)

Netboot is the best path for installing more than one machine, or for headless servers where plugging in a USB stick is awkward. The target machine PXE-boots the live installer over the network from a netboot server on your LAN — no removable media required.

The netboot server answers via dual-architecture proxyDHCP so a mixed fleet just works:

  • UEFI machines get the signed shim → grub → kernel chain, so they boot under Secure Boot with nothing to disable.
  • Legacy BIOS machines get chained through iPXE instead.

The server hands out vmlinuz, initrd, and filesystem.squashfs over TFTP/HTTP; the live system loads into RAM and comes up into the installer wizard.

Enable network boot in firmware first

On the target machine, enable PXE / network boot in the BIOS/UEFI setup (and, if you're aiming for Secure Boot, leave Secure Boot on — the UEFI chain is signed). Set the machine to boot from the network, save, and reboot.

Once the machine boots into the wizard, follow The on-screen installer below.

Option 2: USB / ISO (single machine)

For a one-off install on a machine you can physically reach, write the bootable ISO to a USB stick.

1. Get the ISO. The release artifact is named eightly-<version>-amd64.iso — check the dashboard footer or Settings on an existing box, or ask wherever you got the download link, for the version number to use.

2. Write it to a USB stick (this erases the stick). Replace /dev/sdX with your USB device — double-check it with lsblk first.

sudo dd if=eightly-<version>-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync

Use balenaEtcher or Rufus in DD image mode.

3. Boot the target machine from the USB stick. Enter the boot menu (often F11/F12/Esc at power-on) and pick the USB device.

The same ISO is what you attach as virtual media on a server's out-of-band controller (Dell iDRAC, HPE iLO, Supermicro IPMI) — or on a remote-KVM device like a JetKVM — to install a remote machine without touching it physically. Virtual media runs at USB-2 speed, so expect the boot into the installer to take a few minutes longer than from a local USB stick.

Secure Boot

The USB/ISO boots with Secure Boot on. Its UEFI bootloader uses the Debian-signed shim and GRUB, so there is nothing to turn off in firmware.

Once the machine boots into the wizard, follow The on-screen installer below.

The on-screen installer

However you booted, the machine comes up into a fullscreen installer wizard (a Chromium kiosk on the console). It's fully keyboard-operable, so you don't need a mouse. It walks you through, in order:

1. Welcome. One screen, one button — click Get started. Nothing is written to disk yet.

2. Select the install disk. The installer lists the disks it detects with their model and size. Select the drive Eight.ly OS should be installed onto, and choose the root filesystem — ext4 (default), xfs, or btrfs. You can also set a custom root partition size (minimum 20 GiB); leave it blank to use the whole disk.

Installing erases the target disk

The install wipes and repartitions the disk you select. To arm the wipe, the confirm step at the end makes you type a confirmation word before anything is written — this is deliberate friction so you can't nuke the wrong drive by accident.

3. Name this machine. Give the box a hostname, or leave it blank and the installed system generates one at first boot.

4. Network. Leave it on DHCP (default) and the installed system picks up an address from your router, or set a static IPv4 address with prefix, gateway, and DNS.

5. Remote access. Turn on SSH to manage the box remotely from a terminal instead of only the web dashboard. If you enable it, you create a named admin account right here — a password (at least 6 characters), an SSH public key, or both. Root can never log in over SSH; this named account is how you get a shell. Leave SSH off if you only want to manage the box from the dashboard.

6. Confirm. Review the summary — disk, filesystem, hostname, network, SSH — then type the confirmation word shown on screen to arm the wipe. Nothing is written to disk before this step.

7. Install. The wizard streams live progress as it partitions the disk, unpacks the system, installs the signed bootloader, and stages the Nova models onto the new install. When it finishes, click Reboot now (or remove the install media and power-cycle by hand).

The installer includes guardrails that stop common footguns before they cost you a reboot:

  • It refuses to install onto the boot medium itself (you can't overwrite the USB stick / live image you booted from).
  • Only one install can run at a time — a second attempt is refused rather than allowed to race the first.

First boot

After the installer reboots into the installed system, the machine comes up as a running Eight.ly OS appliance.

1. Open the dashboard. Browse to your server on port 8080:

http://<server-ip>:8080

If your network supports mDNS you can also try http://eightly.local:8080.

2. Create your admin account. There's no seeded default login. The first screen detects that no admin exists yet and asks you to pick a username and password right there — that account is created and you're logged in immediately.

Pick a real password now

This is the only account with full admin access, and there's no default to fall back on if you forget it. Use a real password, not something you'll forget.

3. Run the setup wizard. After the admin account is created you land straight in the setup wizard and walk through Theme, Storage, Cache Drive, Network, Security & Auth, Backup, Monitoring, and One-Click Deploy. See Setup Wizard for a step-by-step walkthrough.

Nova already works

Because the models were pre-staged during install, Nova answers immediately — there's nothing to download. Ask it a question from the dashboard as soon as you're logged in.

Next steps

Something went wrong?

Check the FAQ & Troubleshooting guide, or ask in Discord.