sculpt_bootfb: I get a black screen with a faint mouse pointer in the center. No activity on USB drive. USB mouse and USB keyboard are unresponsive.
intel_fb: I get a black screen with “GENODE” in the center. No activity on USB drive. USB mouse and USB keyboard are unresponsive.
vesa_fb: I get a black screen with “GENODE” in the center. No activity on USB drive. USB mouse and USB keyboard are unresponsive.
vesa_fb_simple: I get a repeating series of colorful screens but nothing useful. No activity on USB drive. USB mouse and USB keyboard are unresponsive.
boot_fb_log: I get a gray screen with two windows. One is labeled “terminal →”, the other contains a sort of spinning polyhedron titled “nano3d →”. No activity on USB drive. USB mouse and USB keyboard are unresponsive.
boot_fb: I get a blue screen with a red square in the upper left corner.. No activity on USB drive. USB mouse and USB keyboard are unresponsive.
boot_fb_platform_log: I get a gray screen with two windows. One is labeled “terminal →”, the other contains a sort of spinning polyhedron titled “nano3d →”. Note: the polyhedron stops spinning after about 1 second. No activity on USB drive. USB mouse and USB keyboard are unresponsive.
So: what am I doing wrong? Is my PC too old?
Note: graphics card is on-board Intel (i915, I think) and the monitor is connected through VGA.
It certainly is a platform we do not test but it is far from too old (we use a i7-4770 on a ASUS CS-B system in our CI regularly).
boot_fb_platform_log: I get a gray screen with two windows. One is labeled “terminal →”, the other contains a sort of spinning polyhedron titled “nano3d →”. Note: the polyhedron stops spinning after about 1 second. No activity on USB drive. USB mouse and USB keyboard are unresponsive.
It puzzles me that the system apparently grinds to a halt (as the animated object should not stop spinning) after some time. That should not happen.
On certain systems we noticed problems with the BIOS USB handoff where the firmware interaction leads to halting the system for some seconds at a time.
Does it make a difference whether you use the USB2.0 or USB3,1 ports?
Is there a way to get more verbose information about the booting process?
The MSI H110M-PRO-D(?) features an internal serial port connector (you might have to check the pin layout in the manual as there are different ones) that could be used to gather more information as the LOG output should be also printed to the serial port in @alex-ab’s debug image.
Next problem: it seems that networking does not work, neither wired nor USB wireless.
AFAICT the RTL8111H on the H110M-PRO-D nic should be supported by our R8169 Linux driver port - could you please check the LOG for any suspicious messages?
The wired internet works (I needed to change the settings on my router).
I managed to do a few steps of the tutorial.
I installed the web browser and I was a bit disappointed. No support for Japanese….. Websites that look like the good old days of 25 years ago with only little squares instead of text. And the support for keyboards is so limited!
I will take some time on the weekend to investigate a bit more about the web browser and support for Japanese. Perhaps I can download a font somewhere.
Have you tried enabling acpi support from the + → options menu? This gives you a new option in System → Power → Hard power down, which might be what you’re looking for.
While the guide here is for adding emoji support to falkon, I’m sure you can follow the same steps to add any custom font of your choosing.
I have tried to install SculptOS on a USB key as described on the website, but the entire process was very time consuming since I was using a USB-2 port. I am not sure that SculptOS boots from USB-3 on my PC but I will try later.
Another problem is that I need to use a wired internet connection, and the desk is quite far away from my router. It is like my first apartment in 2002 or so, with LAN cables lying around. I am not sure I want to go back to those times.
I would prefer to install SculptOS to hard disk, but it will have to be a multi-boot setup since I want to keep access to linux and I also want to try to install minix-3.4.0 to a separate partition. So before I take any more drastic action I want to make sure that everything will work more or less as expected.
Just to take a step back, and look at the broader perspective:
We are at a very interesting time in the evolution of Genode / Sculpt, which I would characterize as the “early adopter” phase for everyday use. Long story short - it can be used for everyday tasks, but sometimes only through virtualization (since not all software has been ported natively yet), and configuring the system still requires some expertise.
Bad news: Not everything is easy. Good news: The community is small enough that all of our voices are heard by the team, and they are remarkably responsive!
For software that hasn’t been ported yet, the typical thing to do is run a Linux VM in either VirtualBox or Seoul, which gives you the full range of Linux software, and allows a gradual transition as new packages are ported. This is how the Genode devs currently do Genode development, for example (although native development is on the Roadmap, too!).
As far as language support in Leitzentrale, I don’t know what the plans are for that. But keep in mind that Leitzentrale is simply a front-end for manipulating humanly-readable configuration files, so we in the community can write whatever front-ends we want!
Early Adopter phase - it’s a blessing and a curse.
Looking at the GENODE / ScultpOS website, the “News” section goes back to 2008. That is 18 years. If that is still “early adopter phase”, then how long does it take to get a fully functional system
A, yes, the often heard comment in the open-source community: “we don’t have X, but you’re free to write it yourself!” I am not convinced I want to spend my (limited) time in this way.
To be honest, I am very surprised at the very limited “internationalization” of GENODE/SculptOS. Most of the world’s population does not use German as their native language (even Japanese is a much bigger language), and my estimate is that less than 50% uses the latin alphabet for their native language (Chinese, Korean and Japanese are 25% - 30%, then Hindi, Arabic, …). I know that in older computers (16-bit systems) it was basically impossible to support more than one “locale” at a time, but in 2026 it is rather amateurish: 6 keyboard layouts and no support for IME / iBus. Every tablet / smartphone in the world supports Unicode input and output.
I also have an older (2016-era) laptop that has the same sequence of results with the debug image, down to the spinning polygon freezing after a second. Sadly couldn’t find a USB XHCI handoff setting in by BIOS so didn’t get further
Let’s take another step back, for an even wider perspective.
Genode began all those years ago as an experimental proof-of-concept of an entirely new philosophy of OS design, with primary goals of security and reliability. The concept proved viable, but the team didn’t stop there. To this day, they are constantly rethinking various assumptions of software design, with many fascinating yet practical results (far too many to list here!). This is all low-level stuff.
Genode Labs is a small company built around this software foundation. They have paying, commercial customers, mainly in the embedded space (AFAIK). They share their research, and make this all available as open source, purely for philosophical reasons.
The Sculpt “user desktop” is a separate project, which began as a playground for radically rethinking some user interface concepts (note the pattern here) and showcasing concepts that are not possible on traditional OSes. It is still in rapid expansion mode, and is not yet ready for everyday users, but it can be used as a “daily driver” OS (as it is for the Genode team themselves), using Virtualization for functionality that hasn’t been ported yet.
Personally, I consider this to be an extremely interesting time - getting in on the ground floor for something really exciting!
That’s where we are. For existing software, packages are being ported as it meets a need (some laid out in the Roadmap) and/or as it scratches an itch. If you need the full range of functionality natively in Genode, it may be too early for you. If you can use Virtualization, everything is available there.
True, Leitzentrale (the “Control Panel” of Sculpt) doesn’t have internationalization support - I don’t know what their plans are for this, since Leitzentrale needs to have a very small TCB. But Qt and other frameworks have been ported, so it should be possible to add this to other software without reinventing the wheel. And of course, traditional OSes are available in VMs in the meantime.
(P.S. Everything is in English, not German, FWIW.)
