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The best way to get started with the Reticulum Network Stack depends on what you want to do.

To understand the foundational philosophy and goals of this system, read the Zen of Reticulum.

For full details and examples, have a look at the Getting Started Fast section of the Reticulum Manual.

To install Reticulum and related utilities on your system, the easiest way is via pip:

T282828

You can then start any program that uses Reticulum, or start Reticulum as a system service with the rnsd utility.

If T383838pip is not available on your system, install the T383838python3 and T383838python3-pip packages for your OS first.

When first started, Reticulum will create a default configuration file, providing basic connectivity to other Reticulum peers that might be locally reachable. If any of those local peers are Transport Instances, these might connect you to wider networks. The default config file contains a few examples, and references for creating a more complex configuration.

For more detailed examples on how to expand communication over many mediums such as packet radio or LoRa, serial ports, or over fast IP links and the Internet using the UDP and TCP interfaces, take a look at the Supported Interfaces section of the Reticulum Manual.

Reticulum includes a range of useful utilities for managing your networks, viewing status and information, and other tasks. You can read more about these programs in the Included Utility Programs section of the Reticulum Manual.

• The system daemon T383838rnsd for running Reticulum as an always-available service

• An interface status utility called T383838rnstatus, that displays information about interfaces

• The path lookup and management tool T383838rnpath letting you view and modify path tables

• A diagnostics tool called T383838rnprobe for checking connectivity to destinations

• A simple file transfer program called T383838rncp making it easy to copy files to remote systems

• The remote command execution program T383838rnx that let's you run commands and programs and retrieve output from remote systems

All tools, including T383838rnx and T383838rncp, work reliably and well even over very low-bandwidth links like LoRa or Packet Radio.

If you want to quickly get an idea of what Reticulum can do, take a look at the following resources.

• For an off-grid, encrypted and resilient mesh communications platform, see Nomad Network

• The Android, Linux and macOS app Sideband has a graphical interface and focuses on ease of use.

• LXMF is a distributed, delay and disruption tolerant message transfer protocol built on Reticulum

The installation of the default T383838rns package requires the dependencies listed below. Almost all systems and distributions have readily available packages for these dependencies, and when the T383838rns package is installed with T383838pip, they will be downloaded and installed as well.

• PyCA/cryptography

• netifaces

• pyserial

On more unusual systems, and in some rare cases, it might not be possible to install or even compile one or more of the above modules. In such situations, you can use the T383838rnspure package instead, which require no external dependencies for installation. Please note that the contents of the T383838rns and T383838rnspure packages are identical. The only difference is that the T383838rnspure package lists no dependencies required for installation.

No matter how Reticulum is installed and started, it will load external dependencies only if they are needed and available. If for example you want to use Reticulum on a system that cannot support pyserial, it is perfectly possible to do so using the T383838rnspure package, but Reticulum will not be able to use serial-based interfaces. All other available modules will still be loaded when needed.

Please Note! If you use the T383838rnspure package to run Reticulum on systems that do not support PyCA/cryptography, it is important that you read and understand the Cryptographic Primitives section of this site.

Reticulum targets a very wide usable performance envelope, but prioritises functionality and performance over low-bandwidth mediums. The goal is to provide a dynamic performance envelope from 250 bits per second, to 1 gigabit per second on normal hardware.

Currently, the usable performance envelope is approximately 150 bits per second to 1200 megabits per second, with physical mediums faster than that not being saturated. Performance beyond the current level is intended for future upgrades, but not highly prioritised until the wire format and API has been locked in.

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