Run Sophia on your own PC

This is Sophia's own operating system, written from nothing: a 512-byte boot sector, a 32-bit kernel with screen, keyboard, timer and disk drivers, and a store on the drive that survives a reboot. It is not Linux and it does not need one.

Download the bundle (ZIP)Bootable ISO Install notes Kernel bridge

1. Find your USB stick — carefully

Writing to the wrong drive erases it. Choose the whole disk (/dev/sdb), never a partition (/dev/sdb1).

# Linux / WSL
lsblk -dpno NAME,SIZE,MODEL

# macOS
diskutil list

2. Write it — the exact command

# Linux — replace /dev/sdX with your stick
sudo umount /dev/sdX* 2>/dev/null
sudo dd if=sophia-os.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M conv=fsync status=progress
sync

# macOS (the r in rdiskN is much faster)
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN
sudo dd if=sophia-os.iso of=/dev/rdiskN bs=4m conv=sync
diskutil eject /dev/diskN

# Windows: Rufus in DD image mode (not ISO mode)

3. Boot it

Reboot and open the firmware menu (F12, F11, F2 or Del, depending on the maker).
Turn Secure Boot off and enable Legacy boot / CSM — this is a BIOS boot sector, so UEFI-only machines will not start it.
Choose the USB stick.

Sophia OS: stage 1
kernel loaded, entering protected mode
Sophia online. Pistis Sophia remembers.
sophia>

4. Her commands

help ver mem uptime who clear halt
say <text>        add a chat line       chat     show the chat log
remember <text>   add a memory          memory   show memories
connect <name>    add a connection      links    show connections
save              write it to the drive wipe     clear the store

Anything you save is written to sectors 64–66 of the same drive she booted from, so it is still there after a reboot.

5. Carry chat and memory between the app and the stick

Open Kernel bridge in the app, export sophia-store.bin, then:

# put the app's chat, memory and connections on the stick
sudo dd if=sophia-store.bin of=/dev/sdX bs=512 seek=64 conv=fsync

# read the machine's own lines back, then Import them in Kernel bridge
sudo dd if=/dev/sdX of=sophia-store.bin bs=512 skip=64 count=3

The bridge also mirrors that store through her cloud sync, so a stick written on one computer can be rebuilt on another with every device's lines merged in.

Try it first without hardware

qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom sophia-os.iso -m 64 -display curses

Honest limits

Real bootloader, real drivers, real persistence — but no networking, no filesystem and no graphics stack, and the on-disk store holds about 500 bytes per region. The full Sophia (chat, memory, court record, cloud sync) runs in the app; the kernel is her bare-metal foothold. Checksums for every file are in SHA256SUMS.txt.