Installing inside a virtual machine

Prerequisites

Caution

GNOME Boxes is not officially supported due to the lack of simple TPM 2 support.

Note

If you want to install AstrOS or other operating systems inside AstrOS, you can skip this step and enable the Virtualization system extension.

In short: you need a virtualization environment that supports UEFI and TPM 2.0.

We recommend using qemu, libvirt and virt-manager and will use them for this guide.

Especially important are edk2-ovmf for UEFI support and swtpm for TPM support. Depending on your distribution, they may be dependencies of the previously mentioned packages.

We found that using the virt-manager flatpak with the QEMU extension was the easiest way to install the whole virtualization stack.

Installation

1. Download and decompress AstrOS:

   unzstd AstrOS-installer_latest_x86-64.raw.zst

2. Create a new machine and select Manual install:

   

3. Complete the setup by selecting Arch as the distribution, allocating sufficient memory and CPUs, creating a virtual disk image with at least 30 GB of Storage, and most importantly, ticking the Customise configuration before install box.

4. In the Overview section, change BIOS to UEFI firmware.

5. Click Add Hardware, navigate to storage, tick Select or create custom storage and search for the AstrOS install image.

6. Click on Add Hardware again and add a TPM device.

7. Recommended: Enable 3D acceleration.

8. You can now start the installation by clicking on Begin Installation in the top left.