11. Getting the Image

amadeOS comes as one file, the image amadeos-amd64.iso. It contains the live system and the installer, and it is written onto a USB stick as it is (chapter 12).

Planned

amadeOS has not had its first release yet, so there is no download page. With the first release (milestone M12 of the ROADMAP) the image will be offered for download together with its checksum and a release manifest that lists every package in it. Until then, the image is built from the source code, as described below.

Building the image yourself

On a computer with Debian or Ubuntu Linux, the script buildDistribution.sh of the amadeos repository builds every package of amadeOS from the current source code and then the image:

git clone https://github.com/datazuul/amadeos.git
cd amadeos
./buildDistribution.sh

It fetches the other repositories (the desktop, the applications and the games) next to amadeos, builds them and puts the image into artifacts/amadeos-amd64.iso. It needs Java 25, live-build, sudo and an internet connection, and it takes a while, because it builds and tests every package. Chapter 62 explains the build and its options in detail; CONTRIBUTING.md lists the packages to install first.

Checking the image

Next to the image lies a checksum file, amadeos-amd64.iso.sha256. It lets you check that the image arrived complete and unchanged, which matters most for an image downloaded from the internet. On Linux:

sha256sum -c amadeos-amd64.iso.sha256

The answer amadeos-amd64.iso: OK means the image is fine. On Windows, the PowerShell command Get-FileHash amadeos-amd64.iso prints the checksum, which you compare with the one in the .sha256 file; on macOS, shasum -a 256 amadeos-amd64.iso does the same.

Your data

A checksum proves that the file is the one that was published, not that the publisher is trustworthy. That is why amadeOS publishes its whole source code and builds the image from it with a script anyone can run: you can check what is in the image, not only that it arrived intact.