I finally had time to revisit this project (running StartOS on an Optiplex). I’m happy to report that I was able to resolve the previous issue I was having. Recapping here for others who might be experiencing the same issue.
The Problem: StartOS was installing fine and I could navigate its menus in kiosk mode, but it was not connecting to the internet, which meant no services were showing up in the marketplace.
The Logs: The kernel logs suggested that veth0 and veth1 were “entering disabled state” and staying there.
Troubleshooting: I poked around in the BIOS, eventually narrowing it down to the Integrated NIC section of the BIOS.
The Solution: Switching the radio selection from “Enabled w/PXE” to “Enabled” seemed to do the trick. After restarting the machine and waiting a couple of minutes for the connection to resolve (presumably Tor), the marketplace services showed up and I got to experience the magic of installing and configuring a Linux based server side app via a very user friendly GUI. The Start9 team is nailing that experience! For anyone who has setup a node manually, the value of StartOS is undeniable.
Still tinkering. I need to see how it does in the wild. But so far so good.