Hardware on PAI

PAI is a general-purpose Debian-based live distro, so most hardware from the last decade works. A few things are worth knowing before you flash.

Quick compatibility check

If you have any of:

• A 64-bit CPU (Intel Core i3/i5/i7 from 2013 onwards, Ryzen, Apple Silicon via UTM, Raspberry Pi 4/5, typical ARM servers).
• 8 GB RAM minimum (16 GB recommended for larger LLMs).
• A USB 3.0 port (USB 2.0 works but is slow).

…PAI will almost certainly boot. For the exhaustive list, see ../general/system-requirements.md.

GPU support

GPU	Status	Notes
Intel integrated	Works	Mesa drivers
AMD (recent)	Works	Mesa + ROCm for Ollama
NVIDIA (proprietary)	Extra step	See ../advanced/gpu-setup.md
Apple Silicon (bare)	No	Boot PAI under UTM instead

Without a GPU, Ollama runs CPU-only — slower, but everything works.

Peripherals

• Keyboard / mouse / trackpad: anything USB or PS/2. Bluetooth needs pairing after boot.
• Wi-Fi: any card Debian stable supports. Broadcom and some Realtek chips need the non-free firmware, which is included in the PAI image.
• Webcams / microphones: work, but they're blacklisted at udev level by default. Re-enable per session in ../apps/ settings.

Hardware wallets

Ledger, Trezor, Coldcard, Keystone, and Jade all work via USB. udev rules ship with the ISO.

Unsupported / known bad

• Machines with Intel VMD RAID enabled in BIOS. Switch to AHCI.
• Some Surface Pro tablets need iomem=relaxed on the kernel cmdline.
• T2-era Macs (2018–2020) need a specific boot flow, covered in ../first-steps/starting-on-mac.md.

Running in a VM

If bare-metal doesn't work or you want a sandbox, run PAI inside UTM, VirtualBox, VMware, Hyper-V, or QEMU/KVM. See ../advanced/running-in-a-vm.md.

USB medium

• Use a USB 3.0 stick of at least 16 GB. Larger is fine; persistence will grow to fill the extra space.
• Cheap no-brand sticks will work but wear out fast. PAI is append-heavy when persistence is on.
• Flashing instructions: ../USB-FLASHING.md.