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Efrain Restrepo edited this page Jun 18, 2026 · 1 revision

Installing HarnessOS

Prerequisites

  • UEFI-capable machine (BIOS Legacy/CSM not supported)
  • 40 GB disk space minimum (80 GB recommended)
  • 4 GB RAM minimum (8 GB recommended)
  • Internet connection (required to install NVIDIA drivers and online tools)

Running the installer

Boot from the live USB and run:

harness-install

Installer screens

1. Welcome

Shows detected hardware: CPU model, RAM, GPU vendor. Confirms you're running on supported hardware.

2. Disk Setup

Lists all available disks. Select the target disk. The installer uses a fixed BTRFS layout — no manual partitioning required.

Partition layout:

Partition Size Filesystem Purpose
p1 512 MB FAT32 EFI System Partition
p2 Remaining BTRFS System + data

BTRFS subvolumes:

Subvolume Mount Options
@ / noatime,compress=zstd:1,space_cache=v2
@home /home noatime,compress=zstd:1,space_cache=v2
@var /var noatime,compress=zstd:1,space_cache=v2
@var_log /var/log noatime,compress=zstd:1,space_cache=v2
@snapshots /.snapshots Snapper snapshot storage
@swap /swap NoCoW (chattr +C) — required for swapfile on BTRFS

3. User Setup

  • Hostname
  • Username and password
  • Timezone (auto-detected by IP)
  • Locale

4. GPU Setup

The installer auto-detects your GPU vendor.

GPU Driver installed
NVIDIA nvidia-dkms + CUDA toolkit
AMD mesa + vulkan-radeon
Intel mesa + vulkan-intel

For NVIDIA, nvidia-dkms is used instead of nvidia because HarnessOS uses the linux-zen kernel, which requires DKMS drivers.

5. Software Profile

Choose what to install:

  • Full AI Stack (default): Claude CLI, Ollama, GitHub Copilot
  • CUDA/ROCm: GPU compute libraries
  • Extra Languages: Additional language runtimes

6. Confirm

Review all choices. This is the last step before disk writes begin. Cancelling here leaves your disk untouched.

7. Progress

Real-time log of pacstrap, chroot configuration, bootloader install, and dotfiles deployment.

Post-installation

After reboot into the installed system:

  1. Connect to the internet — harness-online-setup will run automatically and install Claude CLI, pnpm, TypeScript tools.
  2. Authenticate Claude: claude — follow the login prompt.
  3. Pull an Ollama model: ollama pull llama3.2
  4. Open VS Code: code .

Bootloader

HarnessOS installs systemd-boot as the bootloader. Entries are at /boot/loader/entries/. The default timeout is 4 seconds.

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