Getting NixOS

NixOS is free software, released under a permissive MIT/X11 license.

We provide several ISO images that you can burn onto a CD or run in a virtual machine. These are generated automatically from the NixOS Subversion repository, so they’re always up to date.

Warning: NixOS is a research project, fairly bleeding edge, and lacks the QA resources of more popular Linux distributions. It also doesn’t yet have a nice graphical, user-friendly installer. Therefore NixOS is currently not intended for novice Linux users, and you probably shouldn’t run it on production machines (we do, but we have to eat our own dogfood). Also, Nixpkgs has only a tenth or so of the number of packages in (say) Debian, so you may find that your favourite package is missing — if so, please consider contributing it.

Graphical live CD

This CD contains the NixOS installer as well as X11, KDE 4 and several applications. It’s a live CD, so it allows you to get an impression of NixOS (and the Nix package manager) before installing it.

Minimal installation CD

This CD does not contain X11, and is therefore a lot smaller. You have to run the installer from the console. It contains a number of rescue tools.

Installing NixOS

For installation instructions, please see the manual.

Old releases

ISO images of previous versions are also available.