Release channels

Nosferato ships NosferatOS the way Apple ships macOS — same brand parent, distinct OS name. NosferatOS comes in three flavors:

Channel	Cadence	Source	Debian	Use case
daily	nightly cron	nosferato branch HEAD	testing + sid backports	bleeding-edge features, latest nexmon, possibly broken
weekly	Sundays 00:00 UTC	tagged weekly-YYYY-WW snapshot	testing pinned that week	mostly-tested rolling, ~1 day soak
stable	milestone releases	tagged vN.M	Bookworm stable only	vetted, supported, the one you give to someone else

Artifact format

nosferatos-daily-2026.05.11-b15e9e2.img.xz       # date + short-SHA
nosferatos-weekly-2026.19.img.xz                 # ISO week
nosferatos-1.0-phantom-blood.img.xz              # codenamed milestones

Stable codenames pull from JoJo / vampire lore. The first cut will be phantom-blood.

How to flash a channel

Default is stable. Override with --channel:

infra/nosferato/bootstrap/flash.sh                    # → stable
infra/nosferato/bootstrap/flash.sh --channel daily    # → today's bleeding edge
infra/nosferato/bootstrap/flash.sh --channel weekly   # → last Sunday's snapshot

flash.sh pulls the matching artifact from GitHub Releases, verifies its SHA256 against the channel manifest, then dds it onto /dev/disk5 (with the same label-cross-check guard as build.sh).

How to build from scratch instead

build.sh debootstraps from scratch via Multipass — same flow as the CI runner. Use this when iterating on NosferatOS itself; for day-to-day "I just want a fresh rig", flash.sh --channel stable is faster.

Pi self-update (queued)

Once the channel pipeline is up:

sudo nosferatos-update --channel weekly

Pulls the same artifacts over wifi, flashes the partition the rig isn't currently running from, marks it as the next-boot target, reboots into it. Tracking issue: still queued — depends on the channel pipeline landing first.

Tracking

S01E11 — NosferatOS release channels