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Installing Venu Pacific

Prefer to watch first? The whole process, start to finish:

(Requires internet to play — the written steps below cover everything offline.)

What you need

  • A USB flash drive, 8GB or larger (the ISO is ~4.7GB) — writing the ISO to it erases everything already on it
  • A computer to write the ISO with (any OS works — the write step below uses dd, but a GUI tool like Balena Etcher or Rufus works just as well if you'd rather not use a terminal)
  • The target machine you're installing Venu Pacific on

1. Get the ISO

Either download a released ISO (see Download & verify), or build one yourself from source:

./scripts/build-debs.sh
cp dist/*.deb config/config/packages.chroot/
cd config
sudo lb clean
lb config
sudo lb build

The first two commands build Venu Pacific's own .deb packages and stage them where live-build can find them. Everything Venu Pacific-specific — the apps, branding, translations and settings — reaches the image as real packages, which is what lets an installed machine receive updates through apt afterwards (see Getting updates). You need build-essential debhelper gettext installed, and the archive signing key must exist (./scripts/apt-repo/make-key.sh, once).

If you can't install debhelper (no sudo), use ./scripts/build-debs-in-docker.sh instead of the first line — it runs the same build in a Debian trixie container and hands the output back to your own user.

Run lb config with no arguments — every setting (distribution, archive areas, the "Venu Pacific" ISO volume label, no classic Debian Installer) is already committed in the config/ tree, and lb config regenerates from those saved values. Passing flags on the command line overrides the committed configuration and is how stale branding once ended up on a build.

This produces config/live-image-amd64.hybrid.iso (~4.7GB — it includes the AI model and the offline encyclopedias). Building needs root (for the chroot/debootstrap steps), downloads several GB on the first run, and takes from under an hour to several hours depending on connection and hardware — see CONTRIBUTING.md if you want to help build these as part of a release process instead of one-off locally.

2. Write it to a USB drive

Writing the image erases everything on the USB drive — check it holds nothing you need before starting.

From Windows or macOS

Use Balena Etcher (Windows/macOS/Linux, free) — three clicks:

  1. Flash from file → choose venu-pacific-26.08.16-amd64.iso
  2. Select target → choose your USB drive (check the size matches your stick!)
  3. Flash — and wait for both the write and the verify step to finish before unplugging

On Windows, Rufus also works: select the ISO, pick the drive, keep the defaults, and if it asks choose Write in DD Image mode.

From Linux

Find your drive first — get this right, the next command erases the whole device:

lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,TYPE,TRAN,MODEL

Look for your USB drive by its size and model (it'll show TRAN as usb). Then, as root:

umount /dev/sdX1   # unmount any partitions first, if auto-mounted
dd if=venu-pacific-26.08.16-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress oflag=sync
sync

(Use the filename of the ISO you actually have — a self-built one is named live-image-amd64.hybrid.iso.)

Replace /dev/sdX with your actual drive (e.g. /dev/sda) — not a partition like /dev/sdX1. This takes several minutes depending on the drive's write speed.

3. Boot from the USB drive

Plug the drive into the target machine, power it on, and hit the boot-menu key during startup — commonly F12, F2, Esc, or Del, shown briefly on the manufacturer's splash screen. Pick the USB drive from the list.

If it doesn't show up as a boot option, the machine's UEFI firmware may have Secure Boot enabled, which blocks unsigned custom ISOs like this one. Enter the firmware setup (same boot-menu key, or a dedicated "BIOS/UEFI Setup" option) and disable Secure Boot under Boot/Security settings.

You'll land on a boot menu with these options:

Live system (amd64)
Live system (amd64 fail-safe mode)
Utilities

("Utilities" is just a hardware-detection tool, unrelated to installing — live-build ships it on every image.)

Select Live system (amd64) to boot straight into the desktop without touching the machine's disk at all — nothing is installed or changed until you deliberately run the installer. This is the best way to check your hardware works well (wifi, graphics, etc.) before committing to an install. A first-run welcome window will walk through what's included.

If a machine has unusual graphics hardware and the regular option doesn't boot cleanly, try Live system (fail-safe mode) instead, which disables some kernel mode-setting options.

5. Install to disk

When you're ready, boot into the live desktop (step 4) and launch Install System from the applications menu (this is Calamares' own menu entry). It runs Calamares, which walks through the standard steps:

  1. Welcome — language for the installer itself
  2. Location — timezone
  3. Keyboard — layout
  4. Partitions — erase the whole disk (simplest, for a dedicated machine), or partition manually (for dual-boot or existing partitions you want to keep)
  5. Users — your name, username, password, and machine name
  6. Summary — review before committing
  7. Install — copies the system to disk; takes several minutes
  8. Finish — reboot into your installed system

Verified end-to-end: the full flow above — Erase Disk, Users, Summary, Install, Finish — has been walked through in a QEMU/KVM VM, including confirming the resulting installed system reboots to a working login screen, logs in, and loads the desktop correctly. If you hit anything unexpected, please open an issue with what step failed and what hardware you're on.

After installing

On first login, a welcome window shows once, covering what's included, with a language choice of English, Bislama, or Fijian (Bislama has been reviewed by a fluent speaker; the Fijian translation is new and still awaiting native review). Software updates are checked automatically at a scheduled off-peak time and shown as a notification — nothing downloads without you choosing to, in Synaptic, since bandwidth here is often capped or metered.