OMOS is an early preview. Booting it in a virtual machine is the safest way to look around and costs you nothing. Writing it to a real disk is for a spare machine you don’t mind dedicating.
1. Download the image for your chip
1
Pick your architecture
On the OMOS page, choose the image that matches your machine’s processor: x86_64 (most Intel/AMD laptops and desktops), ARM64 (many single-board computers and ARM machines), or RISC-V.
2
Download and unpack it
You’ll get a compressed disk image. Unpack it to get the raw image file for the next step.
2a. Boot it in a virtual machine
The quickest look. With QEMU installed, boot the image in a window — no changes to your real machine. OMOS starts on the screen and also prints to the serial console, so you can watch it come up.2b. Or boot it on real hardware
1
Write the image to a disk
Write the unpacked image to a USB stick or drive with an imaging tool you trust. This erases the target disk — pick the right device.
2
Boot from it
Boot the machine from that disk (OMOS uses UEFI). It comes up the same way it does in a virtual machine.
What you’ll see
This early build boots into a system console rather than a desktop — the graphical shell is on the roadmap. What you’re looking at is a real operating system coming up on your hardware: bringing up the processor’s cores, its memory, and its protected user space. It’s the foundation everything else is being built on.Next
Platform support
What works on each architecture today.
Architecture
How the system is put together.