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Releases: nclawzero/distro

NCZ 26.5 'Magnetar' — Headless Agent Appliance for Cix Sky1

09 May 04:31
@perlowja perlowja
v26.5-magnetar
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NCZ 26.5 'Magnetar' — Headless Agent Appliance for Cix Sky1 Pre-release
Pre-release

NCZ 26.5 'Magnetar'

Validated platform: Cix Sky1 / Minisforum MS-R1 (arm64, 64GB)
Kernel: 7.0.3-cix-sky1-next + Armchina Zhouyi V3 NPU driver
Base: Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (Resolute Raccoon)

Download

File SHA-256
ncz-magnetar-26.5-arm64.iso a69b5c6c6d9c51ea8c30c2067299f0dccaa4a10825b3b7246b8b21ea9aed9ddb

Reinhardt (desktop) is not included in this release. We did not complete a full validation pass after the final round of installer patches. Reinhardt will follow as a separate validated release.

What is Magnetar?

Magnetar is a headless server appliance for semantic AI memory — not a general-purpose LLM system.

The Cix Sky1 NPU is purpose-built for embeddings, not LLM decode.

The NPU (Zhouyi V3, ~30 TOPS) runs fixed-shape encoder inference: sentence embeddings, cross-encoders, reranking. Validated at 30+ emb/sec on the NPU and 700+ emb/sec via CPU ONNX fallback. The target stack is MNEMOS — a sovereign semantic memory server for AI agents. The Mali-G720 GPU handles LLM decode via llama.cpp Vulkan as a separate, independent tier.

On first boot Magnetar lands on multi-user.target: SSH on port 22, tty2 for local console. No display manager, no desktop.

Install

Flash to USB → boot → select Magnetar at GRUB → wait → remove USB → reboot.

⚠️ Net installer — install is slow (~5–15 min). Ubuntu 26.04 arm64 mirror coverage is thin. We are working on a bundled local mirror for the next release.

Both Reinhardt (desktop) and Magnetar (server) entries appear in the GRUB menu, but only Magnetar is validated in this release.

First boot

SSH in as mini using your SSH key. No pre-seeded keys ship in the distribution build — add yours after install:

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub mini@<host-ip>

Platform support

  • ✅ Cix Sky1 / Minisforum MS-R1 — validated
  • 🔜 Radxa — samples arriving from China in ~2–3 weeks
  • 🔜 Other arm64 mini-PCs — community testing welcome

Release schedule

We are away for the next week. No further releases until approximately June 1. On return:

  • Reinhardt (desktop) validated release
  • Local Ubuntu 26.04 arm64 apt mirror bundled (faster installs)
  • btrfs root option for Magnetar
  • MNEMOS Embedkit bundled in ISO (currently installs post-boot)
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