Install

There is no downloadable image yet. Nerv is built from source on a development machine and installed to a slot on the target. If you want to look at it before then, build a QEMU image — it needs no hardware.

Build and boot a development image

Builds run on a development box, never on the target hardware, in a pure-musl chroot. geofront composes the chroot from the local repository, builds in it and publishes back.

build
# compose a rootfs image
tools/nerv-mkimage --platform qemu-aarch64 --smoke

# boot it under QEMU/KVM and run the smoke test
tools/nerv-qemu --smoke

Build a package

geofront
geofront build packages/core/nerv-dash.spec
geofront --dry-run packages/core/nerv-dash.spec   # resolved plan, touches nothing
geofront --keep    packages/core/nerv-dash.spec   # keep the buildroot to debug a failure

Nerv tracks the newest upstream release of everything and does not pin to old versions. Bumping a package means updating Version: in the spec and rebuilding; geofront stages the new source itself.

Install to hardware

On a machine with an existing Linux install, tools/nerv-ab-install composes Nerv into a second btrfs subvolume without touching the first. The bootloader default stays where it is, so the machine you have keeps booting.

The netboot installer described in cage replaces this once it lands.