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Install Keru

Boot the ISO. The installer starts itself. You choose. It builds.

The whole flow

Keru ships as a live ISO that carries only the installer. There is no prebuilt base image on the disk. The entire system — toolchain, kernel, init, libc, filesystem tooling — is fetched and compiled during installation, on the fly.

Network required. A working connection is a hard requirement for installing Keru. The installer checks it, and if you're not connected it offers to run nmtui for you.

Step by step

  1. Boot the ISO. The live init (live/init) mounts the essentials and launches the installer automatically. No shell prompt, no manual boot gymnastics — it just starts.
  2. Connect if asked. If there's no network yet, you'll be prompted. Say yes and nmtui opens; connect, then continue. The installer re-checks until you're online.
  3. Choose your system. The installer walks through each swappable: init system, C library, filesystem, kernel, privilege elevation, network tools. Defaults are one enter-key away.
  4. Resolve the stability check. Unproven combinations get a warning, never a block. If it's risky, you're told — then you decide.
  5. Build. Confirm, and Keru fetches and compiles your exact system from source into a rootfs, then writes it to disk.
  6. Boot what you chose. Fixed at first boot. The system that lands is precisely the one you designed.

What the installer asks you

ComponentOptions
Init systemrunit · s6 · openrc · systemd · busybox-init · sysvinit · dinit · shepherd
C libraryglibc · musl · uclibc-ng
Filesystemext4 · ext2 · ext3 · btrfs · xfs · zfs · f2fs · jfs · reiserfs
Kernellinux · linux-lts · linux-hardened · linux-cachyos · linux-zen
Privilege elevationdoas · sudo · opendoas · su
Network toolsnmtui · networkmanager · connman · systemd-networkd

What it writes

Your choices are assembled into a make.conf, then handed to the build pipeline: scripts/build-root.sh drives Kama through toolchain bootstrap, base system, kernel, init, and tooling. The result — a rootfs matching your profile — is finalized with mkfs-root.sh and written to the target filesystem.

# Generated by keru-install — hand-tune then rebuild if you like. INIT=runit LIBC=glibc TARGET_FS=ext4 KERNEL=linux SUDO=doas NET=nmtui LICENSE_ACCEPT=(*)
From scratch, every time. There's no binary base to seed. The toolchain is bootstrapped — gcc, binutils, your libc — then the rest on top. This is the "fully from scratch" path, kept honest.

Walk through the installer in detail · See the requirements · Network setup details