OPTION A

Headed installation

You’ll need monitor, keyboard and mouse connected to your Raspberry Pi, and a working Internet connection.

1. Write the image to your SD card or external drive, using your preferred imaging tool. You can flash the image also to a M.2 drive, provided you own a RaspberryPi 5 and a M.2 hat.
2. Boot the Raspberry Pi and complete the onboarding (set username and password).
3. To complete the setup an Internet connection is needed: if using Ethernet, setup continues automatically. If using Wi-Fi:
   • Log in with chosen credentials.
   • Run sudo raspi-config:
     • choose Localization Options / WLAN Country to set your region.
     • choose System Options / Hostname to set a custom hostname (optional)
   • Run nm-tui-connect to join your Wi-Fi network.
4. Once online, the setup process runs automatically downloading and installing packages (several minutes needed, depending on connection and storage speed).
5. When installation completes:
   • The graphical environment launches.
   • You can access it locally or via VNC at <hostname>.local, using the same username and password. <hostname> is the hostname you set during the onboarding or with raspi-config. If you didn’t set a custom one, default hostname is kosmos . If using VNC, we recommend VNC Viewer by RealVNC, but any other viewer will work.

OPTION B

Headless installation

You’ll need your computer to remotely log in and a working Internet connection for the Raspberry Pi.

1. Dowload and install Raspberry Pi Imager on your computer.
2. Use it to write the image to your SD card or external drive. You can flash the image also to a M.2 drive, provided you own a RaspberryPi 5 and a M.2 hat.
   • Select your device (Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi 5…)
   • In the OS selection, scroll down to Use custom and browse the file system to select the downloaded image.
   • Choose the destination drive (your SD, USB drive, …)
   • In the customization options, please set:
     • Username and password. These are the credentials you’ll use to login to the system.
     • Hostname (optional: default is kosmos).
     • If using Wi-Fi, set Wi-Fi country code and your connection SSID and password. Please double check connection details before proceeding.
     • Keyboard layout (optional: only needed if you intend to log in locally with monitor and keyboard).
3. Boot the Raspberry Pi. After two automatic reboots (under 2 minutes), the system will be reachable via SSH at <hostname>.local
4. Log in with your credentials to monitor installation progress.
   • If the Internet connection works, setup proceeds automatically downloading and installing needed packages. A message at login informs you about the setup state and how to monitor its completion or take actions to recover errors.
5. After setup: access the desktop remotely via VNC at <hostname>.local, using the same credentials. We recommend VNC Viewer by RealVNC, but any VNC viewer will work.

AFTER INSTALLATION

You’re ready to Go!

Once installation completes, your Raspberry Pi is ready to connect to your astronomy or observatory equipment and start doing things for you! You can operate it locally or control it remotely via SSH and VNC, perfect for field setups or observatory automation.

Some other useful information to get you started:

PACKAGE REPOSITORY

Use KosmOS packages in your Raspberry Pi OS.

If you already have a working Raspberry Pi OS installation and only want to use KosmOS pre-compiled packages for astronomy software, you only need to add packages repository to your system.

wget -q -O - https://deb.kosmos-pi.org/keys/kosmos.gpg.asc | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/kosmos.gpg.asc
echo 'deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/kosmos.gpg.asc] http://deb.kosmos-pi.org/bookworm bookworm main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kosmos.list
echo 'deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/kosmos.gpg.asc] http://deb.kosmos-pi.org/bookworm bookworm-old main' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kosmos.list
sudo apt update

You can now search and install your needed packages with usual APT tool. Meta packages astrophotography-all and indi-3rdparty-all are available to select most of needed software and drivers.