Troubleshooting
The installer boots old or unexpected content
If you have reused the same USB drive, or another disk, for more than one Kira ISO over time, GRUB's label-based search can occasionally resolve to the wrong device if more than one carries a matching volume label. This shows up as changes you made not seeming to "stick": the installer behaves like an older version even after writing a fresh ISO.
Wipe any old Kira media you are not actively using:
sudo wipefs -a /dev/sdXReplace sdX with the actual device, check with lsblk first. Also make sure you wrote the ISO with conv=fsync, see Installation for the full write command.
No graphical session at login, or a permissions error mentioning the seat
If logging into a desktop session fails with something referencing the seat or the display, and you created your user account outside of the installer's normal flow, check that your user is in the video group:
groups $(whoami)
sudo usermod -aG video $(whoami)Log out and back in for the new group membership to take effect.
The desktop stops rendering after installing a compiler toolchain
Kira's desktop environments link against musl. Installing gcc or binutils on a desktop install pulls in their own compiler runtime libraries, which are built against glibc, not musl. If those land in /usr/lib alongside the musl-native versions the desktop depends on, dynamic linking can pick up the wrong one and the compositor fails to start.
Neither package is needed at runtime on an installed system, they are only relevant if you intend to build software directly on Kira itself. If you do not need them installed system-wide, remove them:
flux remove gcc binutilsflux reports a network error during install
flux treats network failures during a remote cache lookup as a cache miss, not a hard error, and falls back to building the package from source automatically. If you see a genuine failure at this point, it usually means the build itself failed, not the network. Check the build output for the actual failing step.
Reinstalling a package that says it's already installed
For an ordinary package, flux install <package> on something already installed just confirms it is there and exits, it does not force a rebuild. To force a clean reinstall:
flux remove <package>
flux install <package>Meta-packages behave differently: every flux install on a meta-package re-runs its hooks fresh regardless of whether it was installed before, so this is only necessary for packages built from real source.
Checking whether a service is the problem
Most things that look like "Kira is broken" are a single runit service not running. Check its status directly:
sv status /etc/sv/<name>See Init System for how services are organized and managed.
Still stuck
Open an issue on the relevant repository under the shinigami-os organization on GitHub. Include what you were doing, what you expected, and the exact output you got.