Installation

This page walks through installing the Pulse appliance onto a fresh machine. The procedure is the same whether the target is a small industrial PC, a rack server, or a virtual machine — boot the ISO, answer a handful of questions in the installer TUI, and wait for the appliance to reboot into the operator interface.

The steps below match the order of the installer wizard you see on the console, one-for-one.

Hardware requirements

The appliance is intentionally modest in what it needs:

• CPU: 2 cores (x86_64). Any modern Intel or AMD CPU works.
• RAM: 4 GB minimum, 8 GB recommended for sites with more than a few hundred monitors.
• Disk: 32 GB minimum. SSD strongly recommended — the database does enough random I/O that a spinning disk noticeably slows the web UI.
• Firmware: UEFI or legacy BIOS — both are supported. The ISO is a hybrid image that boots either way.
• Network: one ethernet port. Wi-Fi is not supported.

The target disk will be completely erased during installation. If the machine has more than one disk, the installer lets you pick which one to use, but everything on the selected disk is gone once you confirm.

Flashing the ISO to a USB drive

You need a USB drive of 4 GB or more. Any tool that does a raw block copy of the ISO onto the drive will work — the image is bootable as-is, with no partitioning or formatting step required.

• Linux / macOS: sudo dd if=pulse.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync (replace /dev/sdX with the actual device — lsblk or diskutil list will identify it). Get the device wrong and you wipe the wrong disk; double-check before pressing enter.
• Windows: use Rufus in DD image mode (not ISO mode). Select the ISO, select the USB drive, click start.
• Cross-platform GUI: Balena Etcher works on all three operating systems and hides the manual device-picking.

The resulting USB drive boots on both UEFI and legacy-BIOS machines, so the same stick can install any target you have on hand.

First boot

Plug the USB drive into the target machine and power it on. You may need to press a key during the firmware splash to open the boot menu — typical keys are F12, F11, F10, F2, Esc, or Del, depending on the vendor.

In the boot menu, pick the USB drive. The appliance ISO loads and, after a few seconds, drops you into the installer TUI on tty1. There is no graphical installer — the entire setup is keyboard-driven from the console.

If the machine boots back into its existing OS instead of the USB drive, the boot order in firmware is wrong. Reboot, enter firmware setup, and either change the boot priority or use the one-time boot menu again.

Installer wizard

The wizard has eight steps in fixed order. Navigate with the arrow keys (or j / k), enter to confirm a step, esc to step back. ctrl+c aborts the installation entirely.

Welcome

The opening screen names the wizard and summarises what comes next: disk selection, network configuration, optional NTP, and base URL. It also reminds you that the target disk will be erased. Press enter to begin or ctrl+c to back out.

Disk

The installer scans the machine and lists every disk it could install onto. Each row shows the device name (for example /dev/sda), its size, and the model string the firmware reports. Use the arrow keys to highlight the target and press enter to select it.

Warning. The disk you select here is wiped completely. There is no undo once the installation step starts. If the machine has both a working OS disk and a separate empty disk, take a moment to confirm which is which — vendor model strings and sizes are usually enough to tell them apart.

Network

Pick how the appliance gets its IP address:

• DHCP — the network already hands out addresses automatically. Most internal LANs and many plant networks work this way. Choose this if you do not know.
• Static IP — the LAN team has reserved a fixed IP for the appliance. Choosing this reveals three extra fields: the IP address (in CIDR notation, e.g. 192.168.1.100/24), the gateway, and a DNS server.

The static-IP fields are validated before the wizard moves on — typos or impossible values produce an error and you stay on the page until they are fixed. See Networking for guidance on choosing static-IP values and switching modes later.

NTP

Optional. Leave the field empty to use the default upstream NTP pool — fine when the appliance has internet access. If the site uses an internal time server, type its hostname or IP here and the appliance will sync against that instead. Press enter to continue.

BaseURL

The URL that the web UI and the mobile pairing flow will use to reach the appliance. This is the address operators type into a browser and that the mobile app stores when a phone is paired.

• If the appliance has a DNS name on the LAN, use that (https://pulse-system.example.local).
• If not, use the IP you assigned in the previous step (https://192.168.1.100).
• Always include the scheme (https://). Plain hostnames are rejected.

A bad base URL can be changed later from the TUI, but mobile pairings created against the old URL will need to be redone — so it pays to get this right the first time.

Confirm

The wizard shows everything you entered on one screen: disk, network mode (and static-IP details, if any), NTP server, and base URL. It repeats the warning that the disk will be erased. Press enter to start the actual installation, or esc to back up and change something.

Progress

After confirmation, the installer partitions the disk, copies the system image, and writes the configuration. Progress lines stream to the screen as each step completes. Press l at any time to open the full installer log — useful when the wizard pauses on a slow operation and you want to see what is actually happening.

The installation typically takes a few minutes on an SSD; spinning disks can take noticeably longer because of the partitioning and copy steps. Do not power off the machine during this phase.

Done

When the installer finishes, you land on the Done screen. On success it confirms the installation completed and offers a reboot — press enter to reboot, and remove the USB drive while the BIOS POST runs so the machine boots from the freshly installed disk.

If the install failed, the screen shows the error instead; l opens the log so you can see what went wrong, and esc returns you to the Confirm step so you can adjust an answer and retry. ctrl+c exits without rebooting.

After the reboot the appliance comes up with the TUI as the default console session, ready for day-to-day operation.