Troubleshooting

pkexec fails / install won’t start

Sirius’s actual disk and bootc work happens in a separate, privileged process launched with pkexec (see Overview → privilege model). pkexec needs a polkit authentication agent running in your session, or a polkit rule that grants the io.sirius.Installer.run-playbook action outright. If neither is present, pkexec exits with status 127 and the install can’t proceed.

On the LuminusOS live ISO this is already set up for you. If you hit this while adapting Sirius for another environment, make sure a polkit agent is running before Sirius launches the privileged step.

A disk I expect to see isn’t in the picker

The storage page’s disk list filters out disks that are currently in use, most commonly the USB drive or ISO you’re booted from. That’s intentional: it stops you from accidentally partitioning the media you’re running the installer off of. If a disk you expect is missing, check that it isn’t mounted or otherwise in use by the live session.

The language list is nearly empty, or the time zone map is blank

Both pages depend on runtime pieces that are not linked libraries, so a distro packaging Sirius has to include them explicitly (see Adapting → runtime requirements):

• Nearly empty language list: the language page lists the locales installed on the system. Images built with only the C locales (for example glibc-minimal-langpack) need glibc-all-langpacks.
• Blank time zone map: the map is decoded by glycin inside a bubblewrap sandbox. Install bubblewrap (and glycin-loaders) or the map area stays empty.

Why does install need so much RAM?

LuminusOS’s live ISO runs entirely from RAM; the root filesystem is a tmpfs. During install, bootc install to-filesystem stages a copy of the compressed container image (the OS itself, several gigabytes) into a temporary directory (image_copy_tmp_dir, currently /var/tmp). On the live ISO, /var/tmp is also RAM-backed tmpfs, sized to 75% of total RAM specifically to leave room for this staging step.

So peak memory during install is roughly: the live session’s own overhead, plus the full staged copy of the image being installed. That’s why LuminusOS’s shipped Workstation installer config raises min_ram_gib to 5 (see Diagnostics → require vs. warn), well above Sirius’s own default of 2. Real-world testing showed that a laptop advertised as having “6 GB” of RAM often reports closer to 5.7 GiB usable to the OS once firmware and hardware reservations are subtracted, so the threshold needs headroom to actually mean what it says.

Planned improvement

This isn’t implemented yet, but the LuminusOS project is tracking it as future work: redirecting that staging temp directory to the target disk (once it’s partitioned and mounted) instead of RAM. That would let installs work with much less physical memory, since the image copy would no longer compete with the live session for RAM. It requires changes to how bootc’s image-copy tmpdir is configured during the live boot, which isn’t done yet.