Reticulum is not installed as a driver or kernel module, as one might expect of a networking stack. Instead, Reticulum is distributed as a Python module, containing the networking core, and a set of utility and daemon programs.

This means that no special privileges are required to install or use it. It is also very light-weight, and easy to transfer to, and install on new systems.

When you have Reticulum installed, any program or application that uses Reticulum will automatically load and initialise Reticulum when it starts, if it is not already running.

In many cases, this approach is sufficient. When any program needs to use Reticulum, it is loaded, initialised, interfaces are brought up, and the program can now communicate over any Reticulum networks available. If another program starts up and also wants access to the same Reticulum network, the already running instance is simply shared. This works for any number of programs running concurrently, and is very easy to use, but depending on your use case, there are other options.

Reticulum stores all information that it needs to function in a single file-system directory. When Reticulum is started, it will look for a valid configuration directory in the following places:

• /etc/reticulum

• ~/.config/reticulum

• ~/.reticulum

If no existing configuration directory is found, the directory ~/.reticulum is created, and the default configuration will be automatically created here. You can move it to one of the other locations if you wish.

It is also possible to use completely arbitrary configuration directories by specifying the relevant command-line parameters when running Reticulum-based programs. You can also run multiple separate Reticulum instances on the same physical system, either in isolation from each other, or connected together.

In most cases, a single physical system will only need to run one Reticulum instance. This can either be launched at boot, as a system service, or simply be brought up when a program needs it. In either case, any number of programs running on the same system will automatically share the same Reticulum instance, if the configuration allows for it, which it does by default.

The entire configuration of Reticulum is found in the ~/.reticulum/config file. When Reticulum is first started on a new system, a basic, but fully functional configuration file is created. The default configuration looks like this: