2. Prerequisites & System Requirements

Before installing, make sure your environment meets the conditions below. omicOS needs two things: the omicos binary (the program itself) and a Python analysis environment (the engine that runs bioinformatics analyses), plus a cloud account.

2.1 Supported Operating Systems & Platforms

omicos ships prebuilt binaries for six platforms, covering the mainstream systems:

About Linux: The Linux builds of omicos use musl static linking (rather than glibc/gnu), which sidesteps the compatibility problems caused by differing libc versions across distributions—a single binary runs on Ubuntu, CentOS, and HPC login nodes alike.

2.2 Installation Methods

omicos is installed by fetching a prebuilt binary via npm, which only requires Node.js ≥ 16:

npm automatically downloads the binary matching your platform from the table above—no compiler toolchain required. See Chapter 3 for details.

2.3 Python Analysis Environment

omicos itself is just a scheduling kernel; the thing that actually runs scanpy / omicverse is a separate Python environment (about 1 GB, containing scanpy, omicverse, and other bioinformatics packages).

• The recommended approach is to create it in one step with omicOS's built-in omicos env setup command (which manages the virtual environment under the hood with uv).
• You can also point it at an existing conda / venv environment.

See Chapter 4: Configuring the Python Analysis Environment for details.

Note: If you don't configure a Python environment, the omicos daemon will still start, but the moment you ask it to run analysis code the kernel will report scanpy not found. This error appears lazily—it isn't raised at startup, only surfacing when you run an analysis—so be sure to set up the environment first.

2.4 omicOS Cloud Account

Some of omicOS's features (agent chat, cross-device viewing, image hosting, subscription tiers) depend on a cloud account:

• Register an account at auth.omicos.cn.
• See Chapter 5 for the sign-in methods.

2.5 Network Requirements

• omicos needs outbound access to auth.omicos.cn for login, process registration, and syncing.
• By default it only listens on 127.0.0.1 (the local loopback) and exposes no public ports; remote access is achieved through SSH port forwarding or a cloud relay—see the remote deployment recipe for details.

Checklist

Before you begin installing, confirm:

• [ ] Your operating system is among the six platforms above
• [ ] Node.js ≥ 16 is installed
• [ ] You've registered an account at auth.omicos.cn
• [ ] The machine has internet access (at minimum, it can reach auth.omicos.cn)

Once these are met, proceed to Chapter 3: Installing via npm.