This is a submission for the Hermes Agent Challenge
Hermes agent has managed to catch up attention of automation engineers and the developers in just 3 months of establishing itself. Almost everyone around me are trying to setup Hermes on their VPS or the mobile phone by setting up a Linux VM.
Earlier I thought it would require a VPS setup in order to do most of the integration like Openclaw has. Then I came across some of the YouTubers who setup Hermes agent and managed to everything including agentic chat for creating tasks and scheduled jobs to get the work done.
I couldn't just stand watching other people set things up while I just get to play it safe not getting my hands dirty. So I managed to setup the Hermes Agent on Ubuntu Linux.
Below I have documented the visual journey on How to Setup Hermes agent on Ubuntu. It was installed on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS version.
Here's what you should know.
Basically you run the following command and follow the steps. You have option to follow recommended setup or manually setup the required steps.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
If you are new to this, best option would be go with some defaults. That would get your to the setup onboarding lot faster.
What should be the minimum hardware?
You need minimal 4GB onwards RAM on your computer. I had it on the 8GB Ubuntu VM and turns out it works smooth.
You need an API key with Openrouter or Ollama cloud. With which you can use the free models from their catalog and still get to use the Hermes agent like premium user.
Which models are good to try out?
- Minimax M2.5
- Kimi K2.5
- Nvidia Nemotron
- gpt-oss
These are often the free and low cost models you can find in most of the API services out there.
You can integrate faster if you use the web UI or the desktop shell for the Hermes agent. But that's not required you can still integrate from command line. But it becomes easier and faster if you use desktop or any Visual setup.
What you should do once you get comfortable with desktop setup of Hermes agent?
If you can afford move to VPS, some box as small as 4-6GB of RAM and 60GB SSD would be a good starting point to use the Hermes agent from the cloud. Integrate all the required tools and you would get more powerful setup to access from phone and web.
That's it. Train your Hermes agent and enjoy your Automations.
