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nibOS 0.1.0-alpha1🔗

The first public build, released 2026-10-25. For the Anbernic RG DS+ only. Write an image to a microSD card of 16 GB or more with balenaEtcher, Raspberry Pi Imager or dd: Installing has every step. Both editions have the same system underneath, and either can be written over the other.

Every file of the release, with the release notes, is on its GitHub release page.

Checking the download🔗

SHA256SUMS lists the SHA-256 checksum of every file in the release. Download it beside your image, then, in that folder:

sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS --ignore-missing          # Linux
shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS --ignore-missing      # macOS

Each file you have should say OK. On Windows, Get-FileHash <file> in PowerShell prints the checksum to compare with the cards above. A file that doesn’t match: download it again, and don’t write it.

Signatures. Releases are signed with nibOS’s update key, a minisign Ed25519 key with key ID 41B02B0D6ED49D26:

untrusted comment: minisign public key 41B02B0D6ED49D26
RWQmndRuDSuwQVWE+U7OduA6M/9ibhJbai63nHTWlvvpVrLZ2OuF3h6k

The same key is in every image (/usr/lib/nibos/update.pub) and in the nibOS repository (hw/files/usr/lib/nibos/update.pub). What is signed is each edition’s update manifest, which lists the checksum of the update payload and of every 16 MiB piece of it. A device takes an update only if that signature checks out. To check a manifest yourself:

minisign -Vm nibos-0.1.0-alpha1-rgds-dslot.manifest.json -P RWQmndRuDSuwQVWE+U7OduA6M/9ibhJbai63nHTWlvvpVrLZ2OuF3h6k

The .manifest.json, .manifest.json.minisig and .slot files are what a device’s updater downloads; to write a card, use the .img.xz.

What’s in it🔗

• nibOS: mainline U-Boot v2026.10 (SPL in Falcon mode: the kernel 0.65 s after reset), mainline Linux 7.3-rc7 with nibOS’s patches, Arch Linux ARM, nibOS’s hardware layer, the safe mode, the start-up and goodbye pictures, and the updater.
• The DSlot edition adds DSlot, DSperate (DS, GBA), inkdot (Game Boy, Game Boy Color), nibcase with its emulator cores (SNES, NES, Famicom Disk System, Mega Drive, Master System, SG-1000, Game Gear, PC Engine and PC Engine CD, PlayStation, Atari Lynx, Neo Geo Pocket, WonderSwan, Game & Watch), inktick (Game & Watch, a preview), Mesa for the GPU, and nibOS’s PortMaster support (PortMaster itself downloads on first use). Wi-Fi comes on only when you turn it on.
• The base edition: a console on the top screen, with SSH and Wi-Fi at boot.
• Not in it: games, BIOS files, the speakers’ official tuning, and anything from the stock firmware.

Release notes🔗

The first public alpha. In short:

• Images to write to a card, with first-start setup from provision.toml: Wi-Fi, SSH keys, a password, the time zone.
• DSlot as the start-up screen, about 5 seconds from power-on: a page per system, the system picker and cards, resume points, Cart Studio labels and shells, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth settings, the power menu.
• One menu shared by DSlot and every emulator; saves for every system kept together in Saves/.
• The whole board works: both screens and touch, the buttons, speakers and headphones, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, both card slots, USB, deep sleep with Wi-Fi back on wake, charging while off, battery protect.
• Looks after itself: a safe mode when DSlot fails, a watchdog that restarts a hung device, and two copies of the system so a bad update goes back by itself.
• System updates: signed releases written to the copy of the system that isn’t running, from DSlot’s Update page or nib update. Games, saves and settings stay. This is the first release, so there is nothing to update to yet: “No updates published yet” is expected.
• The console with an on-screen keyboard; PortMaster on request.

What isn’t finished: Known issues. Every change, day by day: nibOS’s changelog.

Licences and source🔗

Each image carries, on its NIBOS partition:

• NOTICE: every component, its version and licence; the non-free firmware named as such; the written source offer.
• packages.txt: every Arch Linux ARM package in the image, with its version and licence.
• licenses/: the licence texts that no package installs.

nibOS’s own code is under the GNU GPL, version 3 or later; nibkit and the emulators written for nibOS are MIT or Apache-2.0 (Licences). One emulator core, Snes9x, has a non-commercial licence: the DSlot edition may not be sold, or included in anything sold.

Source code. The complete corresponding source for the GPL and LGPL software in these images, and for at least three years after this release was last offered:

Part	Source
nibOS: kernel and U-Boot patches, device tree, hardware layer, tools	abradburne/nibos at v0.1.0-alpha1
DSlot	abradburne/DSlot at 84d2f35
DSperate	abradburne/DSperate at fc88c53
inkdot	abradburne/inkdot at 9c8d768
nibcase	abradburne/nibcase
inktick	abradburne/inktick
nibkit	abradburne/nibkit at v0.1.0
Arch Linux ARM packages	The source packages of the GPL and LGPL packages in packages.txt, attached to the release

The kernel is mainline Linux at 0fcb05b with the patches in nibOS’s kernel/, socs/rk3568/kernel/ and boards/rg-ds-plus/kernel/; U-Boot is v2026.10 with the patches in uboot/, socs/rk3568/uboot/ and boards/rg-ds-plus/uboot/.