Fast installation

Check the system requirements first — the hardware and the SD card matter, and nothing below works without them.

Recommended. Six actions. About forty minutes, most of it unattended.

At the end the instrument is running the factory snapshot: eight channels alive, the Maschine's pads lit in channel colours, both displays showing their tab rows, and a pattern playing the moment you press Play.

Every step here is done by hand and explained in Manual installation. Come back to that page if something goes wrong, or if you would rather not run a script you have not read.

1 — Flash ZynthianOS

Download the image and its checksum, verify it, then write it to the card with Raspberry Pi Imager. A truncated download produces a Pi that boots most of the way and then behaves inexplicably.

curl -O https://os.zynthian.org/2026-01-27-zynthianos-oram-2601-stable.img.xz
curl -O https://os.zynthian.org/2026-01-27-zynthianos-oram-2601-stable.img.xz.md5
md5sum -c 2026-01-27-zynthianos-oram-2601-stable.img.xz.md5
# → 2026-01-27-zynthianos-oram-2601-stable.img.xz: OK

Use this exact build. Newer vangelis images are a different, still-beta release train and nothing here has been tested on them.

2 — Boot the Pi

Card in, network cable in, power on. A display is optional — see below. ZynthianOS resizes its filesystem and starts its own UI.

3 — Find it on the network

The install runs over SSH, so the Pi has to be reachable first. A cable straight from the Pi to your computer is enough; so is a switch.

Boot the first time with a cable, or with a display. A fresh card holds no WiFi credentials and cannot be given any over WiFi — the admin menu needs a screen, webconf needs a network. Set the WiFi up once by either route, and the Pi is headless and cordless from then on.

If neither name resolves, your machine is not doing mDNS — WSL2 never does. Take the Pi's address off your router; every URL and command here accepts it in place of the name.

Factory defaults, the same on every Zynthian. Change them in webconf before the instrument sits on a network you do not control.

This is the step that traps newcomers — everything after it assumes the Pi answers. If it does not, Reaching the Pi in section 4 works through it at length: both ways out of the WiFi deadlock, the switch and direct-cable wiring, and what to do when the names do not resolve. Upstream's own tutorials are No Hardware Build and Accessing Zynthian from your computer.

4 — Log in over SSH

ssh root@192.168.2.123      # substitute your own address
# or, if the name resolves:  ssh root@zynthian.local
# password: opensynth       # older images: raspberry

As root, not as a user with sudo. That is how ZynthianOS is administered — the installer checks, and refuses to run as anyone else.

5 — Run one command

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Witzman/Generative-Techno-ZynthianMaschine-MKII/main/bootstrap.sh | bash

This takes about ten minutes and looks like it has hung. It compiles the HID daemon on the Pi. Do not interrupt it. It ends by loading the factory snapshot and restarting Zynthian's UI, so the instrument is playing-ready when it returns.

6 — Press Play

The snapshot is already loaded. The installer places it as Zynthian's default snapshot and restarts the UI, so the instrument comes up by itself on a fresh Pi. Nothing to tap.

You should see this:

Nothing happened?

Anything else: work through Manual installation, which gives each step's own check.