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Sculpt OS version 25.04

(published in April 2025)

Sculpt is an open-source general-purpose OS. It combines Genode's microkernel architecture, capability-based security, sandboxed device drivers, and virtual machines in a novel operating system for commodity PC hardware and the PinePhone. Sculpt is used as day-to-day OS by the Genode developers.

The administrative user interface ("Leitzentrale"): The panel at the top gives access to a live view of the system structure (shown), a file browser, network connectivity, power control, and system update/rollback. The interactive graph at the center presents the running components with their relationships and allows the user to interactively add/remove components offered by Genode Labs and federated software providers.

Instructions

Sculpt 25.04 documentation (printable version)

Download disk image

sculpt-25-04.img (33 MiB) (signature, public key)

SHA256 54e8bd5f3b7c5ebf0fac84aa2c103d8bb8efa62ef6bcb5a08f2cad42cc29c366

Mobile-OS version

An experimental phone variant of Sculpt OS tailored for the PinePhone is available at https://depot.genode.org/genodelabs/image. Information about installing and using this variant are available in the form of a dedicated article at https://genodians.org.

Preparing a bootable USB stick on Unix

On Unix-based systems, use the dd command to copy the disk image to a USB stick: 

 sudo dd if=sculpt-25-04.img of=/dev/sdx bs=1M conv=fsync

Here, /dev/sdx refers to the device node of your USB stick. To determine it, you may inspect the output of dmesg after plugging it in.

Preparing a bootable USB stick on MS Windows

Option 1: Rufus

  1. Download and run Rufus (alternative portable executable available)

  2. Plug in your USB thumb drive and select it under "Device"

  3. Download the Sculpt OS image linked above and select it under "Boot selection"

  4. Write to the USB drive by clicking "START"

Option 2: Win32 Disk Imager

  1. Download, install, and run Win32 Disk Imager

  2. Download the Sculpt OS image linked above and select under "Image file"

  3. Plug in your USB thumb drive and select it under "Device"

  4. Write to the USB drive by clicking "Write"

Running Sculpt as VirtualBox appliance

  1. Download the sculpt-25-04.ova (signature) appliance that contains the Sculpt 25.04 image along with a known-to-work VirtualBox configuration.

    SHA256 74b8b57892c5f27b46ce65c5c95e261e25e87d4eb52caa8c5c4b2f6f0abb1740

  2. Start VirtualBox and import the OVA file as appliance.

  3. After boot, you will be presented with one AHCI boot disk, which you should expand via the administrative user interface before using it.

Running Sculpt 25-04 in Qemu

You may take the following command line as starting point for experimenting with Sculpt 25-04 on the Qemu emulator. 

 qemu-system-x86_64 -display sdl -cpu Nehalem-v2 -machine q35 \
                    -m 1024 -drive format=raw,file=sculpt-25-04.img \
                    -netdev user,id=net0 -device e1000,netdev=net0

For better performance, you may also try the options -accel kvm -cpu host.

Previous versions

All previous releases are available at the dedicated Sculpt OS archive page.

© 2025 Genode Labs