using heads

This wiki page should guide you in the process of obtaining heads, and booting into the live system. It's pretty straightforward and there should be no issues if you follow these steps.

downloading

First head off to the downloads page, and find out where to download the ISO, along with the shasums and the gpg signatures.

Once you have obtained all four, and they are in a directory on your filesystem, do the following:

; gpg --verify heads-*.asc
; sha256sum -c heads-*.sha

If there were no errors, you are good to continue. Otherwise, rinse and repeat. Something went wrong.

It is possible to burn the heads ISO to a CD, or use it inside a virtual machine. This isn't documented for now, perhaps in the future. I will show you how to use it from a USB flash drive.

So... Plug in a USB flash drive into your computer. In most cases it will be automagically recognized by your computer and will be given a name such as sdb or something in a similar manner. It resides in /dev on your filesystem. You can check your dmesg output to figure out the correct device if you are not sure. You might see partitions like /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdb2. These will be destroyed once you execute the dd command below.

Once you got it, the only thing you need to do is dd the ISO to a flash drive by doing the following with root permissions (note that the device is /dev/sdb and not /dev/sdb1):

; dd if=heads-*.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=1M && sync

If no errors were seen, sync once more and you are done. You can now use this flash drive to boot into the heads live OS.

Have fun!

booting

Insert the USB stick in your computer and figure out how to boot from it. You will be presented with an interface asking you to login (luther:luther). From there on, as you login, a password will be generated for the root user, and you should take note of it the first time you open a terminal window if you plan to do anything as the root user. You can also login as root (use su) with that password and execute passwd to change it.