First Boot

The first boot of an installed Syn_OS system runs the v43.2 first-boot wizard (rewritten in Crimson Spire to enforce display-manager singleton, with the failed-services pre-flight rewritten as a clean status pipeline). Here’s what to expect.

The boot sequence

GRUB (Phoenix-themed)
  ↓
6.19-synos-ai kernel + 17 Rust modules load
  ↓
Plymouth — Phoenix decay sequence (decay_000 → decay_002 → neural-node sigil)
  ↓
systemd-fsck, then synos-cradle-verify.service confirms the module-signing chain
  ↓
SDDM (Cinnamon greeter, Crimson Spire theme)
  ↓
Cinnamon DE with Rehoboam system monitor overlay

Boot time on a modest SSD lands at ~30 seconds to login prompt; ~86 seconds to a usable desktop with all services healthy (verified by synos-copilot-vm play 02-service-health).

The wizard (one-time)

After the first login, the Syn_OS Onboarding Wizard appears — a Bevy-rendered fullscreen UI with the Cutscene plugin’s typewriter dialogue.

1. ALFRED introduction — the daemon introduces itself, asks for consent to operate in Advisory mode, and explains the four operating modes (Advisory / GameMode / Master / Mesh).
2. Profile confirmation — the ISO profile is read from /etc/synos/brand-meta.toml. You cannot cross-promote here; promotion to Master requires a customer agreement and a fresh image.
3. Security baseline — the Sanctum hardening profile is applied: AppArmor enforce, seccomp filters, kernel lockdown, eBPF monitor enable.
4. Network setup — optional ARCANUM Hive enrollment via Tailscale + WireGuard. If you skip, you can re-run synos-hive-bootstrap later.
5. GRIMOIRE onboarding (GRIMOIRE Public only) — pick your faction (Crimson Spire / Neon Collective / The Warden), accept the Sovereign Operator Path agreement, receive the 10-tool starter kit and your first lab assignment.

The wizard writes its completion state to /var/lib/synos/wizard.completed so it never re-runs unless you delete that flag.

ALFRED is talking — what’s going on?

ALFRED runs as a two-layer architecture:

• Rust daemon (v4.0 API) — system intelligence: CPU/memory optimization, kernel bridge via syscalls 469–485, an 11-endpoint REST API, NATS event bus, the God Mode dashboard aggregator, and the consciousness fusion engine.
• Python layer (v2.1.0) — user-facing assistant: LLM integration, voice, RAG, TUI, and the privacy-first job-hunt mode.

On first boot ALFRED starts in Advisory mode: read-only system inspection, no command execution. You can promote it to GameMode (lab sandboxing) or Master (full execution) via:

synos-alfred-mode set advisory   # default
synos-alfred-mode set gamemode   # for GRIMOIRE labs
synos-alfred-mode set master     # full execution (Master ISO only)
synos-alfred-mode set mesh       # gossip-protocol distributed consciousness

The TUI

synos-ops is a 7-tab terminal UI for everything ALFRED can see:

Tab	Shows
System	CPU / memory / temperature / kernel module status
Benchmark	synos-bench results, neural inference throughput, latency P99
Hive	ARCANUM mesh node grid (gossip state, mTLS health, peer reachability)
Services	systemd unit status, ALFRED REST API, NATS bus, Fragment Field IDS
ALFRED	Consciousness state — coherence, activity, mode, decision latency
Node grid	Per-node CPU / RAM / GPU + assigned models
Models	Loaded LLM / ONNX models, Ollama queue, inference stats

Cycle tabs with Tab / Shift+Tab. Quit with q.

Your first lab (GRIMOIRE Public)

grimoire start

This launches the Bevy faction-HQ scene. Pick Beginner in your chosen faction, accept the lab brief, and the Docker overlay spins up an isolated environment. Submit the flag, earn XP, watch the SkillTree plugin animate the unlock.

After 5 intro labs you have enough XP to spend on your first tool unlock — typically nikto, gobuster, or enum4linux. The catalogue is already on disk; XP just grants execution permission via Curtain v3 capability tokens.

Recovering from a bad boot

If anything fails the boot sequence:

# from a recovery shell or rescue ISO:
synos-doctor --diagnose          # full 41-stage post-install validation
journalctl -u synos-cradle-verify
systemctl --failed

The most common failure mode pre-v43.2 was a customize_airootfs race; the v43.2 fix matrix closed that with the new stage 17e pre-squashfs validation gate (9 assertions blocking broken rootfs before squashfs is sealed).

Next steps

• GRIMOIRE Overview → — what the game is about
• Six-Layer Stack → — what’s actually running on your machine
• ALFRED → — the AI daemon in depth