Installation
There are several ways in which you can perform an install of The Ur Project onto your hardware, or Virtual Machine. They all follow the same basic steps:
Prepare your system for installation
NOTE: The current installer requires a fully empty drive. It does not accept empty space on a partitioned drive as a valid installation target. You either have to make the full space on the drive available for installation, or you can add a new drive to your system that is unpartitioned.
If you have a drive that is fully available, but contains an old installation or a different OS that you want to erase, you can use sudo wipefs -a /dev/<blkdev> to do so. This can be done while the installation image has booted.
Download the image you want to use to install
The Downloads page contains our latest images. You can choose between several of the images provided to perform an install. In general, you will likely just want to use the live USB image. It offers a full GNOME desktop and have a graphical installer interface that will be easy to follow. For those situations where you must have an ISO format image, there is a generic ISO image available. Note that the ISO images only boot to a text prompt. You can however still use the TUI installer, which works exactly like the GUI version, but then in text mode.
Before you use it, check the download against the checksums on the Downloads page.
Burn the image, or attach it to the VM
For a hardware installation, burn the image with e.g. dd directly to the USB stick. Or use a tool like rufus (https://rufus.ie/en/) that is available for other OSs.
If you're attempting to boot the image in a virtual machine, then use your VM manager tools to attach the image file as a block device (VirtIO) to the virtual machine before you boot.
Boot the image
Most BIOS and UEFI firmware opens a boot menu on F12, F11, F8 or Esc, where you can manually choose a boot drive (F2 or Del usually open the firmware setup instead). The USB stick itself has its own boot loader, so you should be presented with a short menu that shows the current Linux kernel version. Either let the timer expire, or press Enter to start it.
Enable networking
This step is required. The installer currently installs the system from the network. Future images may be fully offline install images.
If you're using ethernet, the network should appear online automatically. If you are using WiFi, use either nmcli or the graphical settings application to configure the network settings. The installer will copy your SSID settings to the installed system, so you only need to do that once.
Perform the installation
If you're installing from a console or terminal, you can start live-install as the normal live booting user. If using the ISO format, you may have to use sudo depending on the NoCloud seed data if you're on a cloud host VM.
Otherwise, from the GNOME shell, activate the Installer icon that's pinned to the dash, and the installation program starts up.
Step 1: Choose what to install
You are presented a list of system configurations. These are broad choices. The default choices right now are "Desktop" and "Server". The Desktop installation includes everything you see on the Live USB image with GNOME. The Server installation boots your system to a basic console prompt, and omits any graphical programs entirely, it is mostly a bare server starting point.
Step 2: Choose the target drive
At this point the target drive should have been made empty (including partition table, see the preparation steps at the start). If it isn't empty, you will not be able to select a drive to install onto. You can at any point open a new console and use wipefs to still do so, and retry the installation from the start.
Step 3: Choose a filesystem type
You can currently install using ext4, XFS or btrfs. These are all fine choices and situationally one may be better than the other. It's up to you to decide which one to use.
I'll briefly elaborate on what I'd choose: If installing a Desktop, I'd pick btrfs. The btrfs option creates a subvolume for home and root and this is usually a good option for ordinary desktop PC's. The XFS option is generally decent for servers and certain applications. The ext4 option may be useful for low-end systems and people who want to squeeze a little more out of their hardware. Choose at your own risk, though.
Step 4: Hostname and user account
The user account will be given sudo privileges. Try not to put 123456 as the password, ok? It's already the combination of my luggage.
Next you should be able to click the "Install" button at the bottom.
If you can't click the button then that may be due to the installer still fetching data from the repo/download server. This shouldn't take very long, but it might still happen in certain cases. You may need to check your network connection is working, too.
Step 5: Erase and Install
At this point, you will be presented with a big warning - the next action the installer takes is fully destructive.
The process is shown on the screen as installation progresses so you can follow it and estimate when it will finish. Once done there's nothing left to do but to reboot the system or continue using the booted OS.
Reboot
If you accidentally reboot into the live USB stick again, don't worry! Just do a poweroff first, then you can unplug the USB drive safely at a time when the system is powered down.
Next: Basic system maintenance. If the installation didn't go the way it should, ask for help.