I did not know this image was missing xz

I set out to install Hermes-agent on the GrokBot cloud VM I already use.

The setup

The VM is Debian 13, trixie. The login is box. The host is cursor. sudo works without a password. I confirmed that with exit code 0. The disk is 126GB. Memory is 15GB. Those totals were still 126GB and 15GB on 2026-08-25. Free space at the time of the install was 114GB on disk and 11GB of memory. That is the observation from then. I am not writing later free space. curl, python3, node, and git were already on the box. /workspace persists. Files from three days earlier were still sitting there. The box looked ready.

What happened first

The install script was the first stop. The exact line was:

Rejected: The executable content could not be bound to this review. Run the resolved script directly or provide an explicit working directory.

I ran chmod +x on the resolved script and executed it directly. That went through. The same error is on the Cursor forum, posted by MaydayJohnP on 2026-08-17: https://forum.cursor.com/t/grok-bot-computer-cannot-finish-a-normal-workflow-details/168682 Kevin Neilson's staff reply on 2026-08-18 does not include a workaround for this error. I did not know that was only the first stop.

Where it stopped

Hermes decided Node 20 on the box was too old and fetched Node 26 itself. The archive was a .tar.xz. The VM did not have xz. tar died with:

tar (child): xz: Cannot exec: No such file or directory

I tried to install xz-utils. apt answered:

E: Package 'xz-utils' has no installation candidate

The package lists were empty. sudo apt-get update filled them. A Google Chrome repo was registered too. Then xz-utils installed and the Node extract finished. The installer wanted a wizard. The VM has no TTY. Hermes printed Running in a non-interactive environment (no TTY detected). I wrote the config file myself. Once the files were on disk, doctor reported ✗ ~/.hermes/.env file missing. I had pointed the install at /workspace/hermes. At runtime, if I did not set HERMES_HOME, it looked at the default. I started passing HERMES_HOME=/workspace/hermes on every command. I did not know I would hit all five.

What actually ran

Hermes noticed there was no C++ compiler and installed build-essential. It installed Node 26 after xz was in place. It shipped 82 skills on the first run. I asked a smoke question in Japanese: what is 1+1, answer with the digit only. It answered 2. I pointed it at more than 20 markdown files and told it to write a Japanese summary, save the summary to a path I named, and not mix in guesses. It wrote 706 characters to that path.

Finding out why

The first stop is this host. The message names a review that would not bind the downloaded script. The second stop is the installer fetching Node 26 as a .tar.xz. This image did not have xz. The third stop is this image. The apt lists were empty until I ran apt-get update. The fourth stop is the installer wanting a wizard. This image has no TTY. The fifth stop is the installer looking at ~/.hermes unless HERMES_HOME is set. It stopped on this image. That is as far as I can take it.

What I would do differently

Next time I do this I will run apt-get update first, put xz-utils on the box first, and export HERMES_HOME in the same shell that runs doctor.