First Boot

What happens

• Server tier boots straight to a ZSH shell, logged in as the user you created during installation.
• Desktop tier boots to a graphical login screen (greetd/ReGreet). Log in and it hands off to the desktop environment you chose during installation. There is no separate login manager to configure yourself, it works out of the box.

Update the system

The very first thing worth doing on any fresh install is bringing flux's package sources up to date:

flux update

This syncs the local kotodama recipe repository and the Alpine package index, and checks whether a newer flux, kira-base, or kernel release is available. It never installs anything on its own, it only tells you what is available. See Updating Kira for the full picture.

Look around

A few things worth trying right away:

fetch

Prints a system information summary: distribution info, shell, uptime, and the Kira color palette. It is not run automatically on login, so run it whenever you want it.

flux list

Lists every package currently installed. Add -a to include packages that were pulled in automatically as dependencies rather than installed by name.

flux search <term>

Searches kotodama recipes only, so it only ever turns up kira-* packages. Most software has no recipe at all - it installs straight from Alpine by its plain name, so if flux search comes up empty, just try flux install <name> directly before assuming it isn't packaged.

Install what you need

Kira's base install is intentionally minimal. Whatever you need beyond the default tools, install with flux:

flux install <package>

If you write code, look at the kira-devkit-* packages, they bundle a whole language toolchain in one install. See Shell and Developer Tools for details.

Inspect what is running

Because Kira is transparent by default, nothing about the running system is hidden behind a generated config or a binary you cannot read:

• Installed package metadata lives under /var/lib/flux/installed/<package>/.
• runit services live under /etc/sv/, and sv status /etc/sv/<name> tells you exactly what is running. See Init System.
• The running kernel configuration is inspectable at /proc/config.gz.

Switching desktop environments

If you installed the desktop tier, you are not locked into the desktop environment you picked during installation. See Desktop Overview for how to install and switch between Sleex and SwayFX.

Where to go from here

• flux command reference, for the full package manager toolkit.
• System Overview, for how the pieces of Kira fit together.
• Troubleshooting, if something does not work the way you expect.