Installation modified by Mattia Tadini

Mattia Tadini — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:11:02 -0000

Installation

SkillFishOS installs from a live ISO with the graphical Calamares installer. The whole thing is done with the mouse.

The ISO boots in English to stay universal; you choose your language and keyboard during installation.

1. Requirements

An AMD BC-250 board
An SSD/NVMe to install onto
A monitor on DisplayPort (a passive DP-to-HDMI adapter can work; avoid active ones)
A USB stick (8 GB or more)
Keyboard + mouse

2. Download

Get the latest ISO from the SourceForge Files tab:

Download SkillFishOS 26.06 "Aetherium"

Verify the download (optional) against the provided .sha256 file.

3. Write the ISO to USB

Use balenaEtcher (recommended), Ventoy, or on Linux dd:

sudo dd if=SkillFishOS-26.06-Aetherium-BC250-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress oflag=sync

Replace /dev/sdX with your USB device. dd erases everything on the target device.

4. Boot and install

Boot the BC-250 from the USB stick — you land in the live KDE Plasma desktop.
Launch Install SkillFishOS.
Calamares guides you: language and timezone, keyboard, partitioning (Btrfs with separate @rootfs and @home subvolumes so a system rollback never touches your files), user account, summary and install.
Reboot and remove the stick.

5. First boot

Everything is already configured: optimized kernel, SMU governor, the safe Stock overclock profile, the steampunk desktop, the gaming stack and Btrfs snapshots are all active. Nothing to tune by hand.

From here you can connect a controller, add your games to Steam/EmuDeck, turn on the local AI when you need it, and push the hardware with the Tuner.

Safety net

A Btrfs snapshot is taken before and after every package operation. If an update breaks something, reboot and pick a previous snapshot from GRUB → "SkillFishOS snapshots".

See also: Home · Benchmarks · Screenshots

Recent changes to Installation