Firstlight v1.2.0

Firstlight v1.2.0 rebuilds the user interface. The remote-console protocol stack, the CLI flags and the MCP tool surface are unchanged — this release is about how the client looks and how input reaches it.

The GUI is now drawn by Gio: pure Go, rendered on the GPU through Direct3D 11. There is still no browser engine, no Electron, no web view and no second runtime — both binaries stay self-contained.

What changed

• Light and dark themes that follow the Windows app-theme setting and switch live, including the native title bar.
• New widget set in a flat, macOS-inspired style: rounded cards, an in-window menu bar with dropdowns, sheet-style confirmation dialogs, and a two-part status bar — connection, virtual media, keyboard layout and pointer capture on the left, server power and POST code on the right.
• Launcher reworked around a server list and a connection form, with a visible focus ring and Tab navigation between fields.
• Segoe UI is loaded from the system font directory instead of being embedded, and the application icon is resampled for the 16 px and 32 px sizes Windows asks for.
• Keyboard input still reaches the server only while the pointer is inside the video area, so interacting with menus and dialogs can never leak keystrokes to the console.

Fixes

• An empty single-line input reported zero width and could not be clicked or focused, which made the launcher fields impossible to type into.
• A disabled button delivered its pending click later, once it became enabled again.

Under the hood

• lxn/walk is gone. lxn/win remains only for raw keyboard input, window chrome, the application icon and the file dialogs.
• Gio enables EnableMouseInPointer, so Windows delivers pointer input as WM_POINTER* messages. Mouse handling comes from Gio's event stream; the window-procedure hook keeps only raw keyboard input, which the remote console needs at virtual-key and scancode level.
• Keyboard state no longer depends on GUI toolkit types, which removes the last coupling between the interface and the keyboard maps shared with the MCP bridge.
• New interaction tests drive the widgets through Gio's event router, covering clicks, typing, Enter submission, dropdown selection, disabled entries and modal actions.

Firstlight-mcp.exe is byte-for-byte unaffected by the interface change apart from its reported version: it links none of the UI packages and none of the new modules.

Downloads

File	Contents
Firstlight.exe	GUI remote-console client
Firstlight-mcp.exe	MCP bridge (console application)
Firstlight-v1.2.0-windows-amd64.zip	Both executables plus README, LICENSE, NOTICE and third-party notices
SHA256SUMS.txt	SHA-256 checksums for the three files above

Windows x64. Verify a download with:

Get-FileHash .\Firstlight.exe -Algorithm SHA256

Compatibility

Tested on HPE ProLiant Gen10 and Gen10 Plus, with the remote-console core additionally confirmed on Gen11 and Gen12. Firstlight is an independent community project and is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Firstlight v1.1.0

First release of Firstlight — a remote console for HPE iLO managed servers.

Firstlight gives you keyboard, video and mouse access to a server from power-on through BIOS/UEFI to the running operating system, plus ISO virtual media, power control and boot-override handling. A second executable exposes the same console stack over the Model Context Protocol, so an LLM agent can operate a console under explicit confirmation rules. Both binaries are self-contained: no browser plug-in, no Java, no .NET runtime.

The project was previously developed under the names hpeirc and iLO-KVM.

Downloads

File	Contents
Firstlight.exe	GUI remote-console client
Firstlight-mcp.exe	MCP bridge (console application)
Firstlight-v1.1.0-windows-amd64.zip	Both executables plus README, LICENSE, NOTICE and third-party notices
SHA256SUMS.txt	SHA-256 checksums for the three files above

Windows x64. Verify a download with:

Get-FileHash .\Firstlight.exe -Algorithm SHA256

Features

• Remote KVM: server video, keyboard and mouse, from power-on through BIOS/UEFI to the running OS.
• Both remote-console protocol generations: legacy V1 (iLO 4, including KVM and command-channel encryption) and V2 or newer, detected automatically.
• Shared-session and seize connection modes, with Allow/Deny prompts for incoming legacy join requests.
• ISO virtual media as a virtual CD/DVD device on both protocol paths.
• Power actions (momentary press, press-and-hold, cold boot, reset) and a verified one-time virtual CD/DVD boot override.
• Clipboard-to-HID paste and modular JSON keyboard maps (US and German built in, external maps loaded from keyboard-maps next to the executable).
• Persistent multi-session launcher with DPAPI-protected saved credentials.
• MCP bridge over stdio or stateless Streamable HTTP, with idempotency keys on mutating calls, confirm: true on destructive ones, tool annotations, and an opt-in ISO allow-list directory.
• Embedded icon, application manifest and VERSIONINFO metadata in both executables.

Tested hardware

Generation	Management processor	Status
ProLiant Gen10 / Gen10 Plus	iLO 5	Fully tested
ProLiant Gen11	iLO 6	KVM core tested
ProLiant Gen12	iLO 7	KVM core tested
ProLiant Gen8 / Gen9	iLO 4	Expected to work, not yet confirmed

Licensing and independence

Firstlight is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. The NOTICE file carries the non-affiliation statement, the trademark attribution and the interoperability statement, and Apache-2.0 Section 4(d) requires redistributors to pass it along. Copyright notices and license texts for all twelve third-party Go modules compiled into these binaries are reproduced in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md, which ships inside the release archive.

Firstlight is an independent community project, not affiliated with, sponsored by or supported by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. HPE, iLO, Integrated Lights-Out and ProLiant are trademarks of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP and are referenced only descriptively, to identify the systems this client interoperates with.

Notes

• Test carefully before relying on this for production recovery workflows.
• The MCP bridge's HTTP transport is loopback-only and implements no HTTP authentication in this release; stdio is the preferred transport.