The easiest way to obtain Nix is to download a source distribution. Alternatively, the most recent sources of Nix can be obtained from its Subversion repository. For example, the following command will check out the latest revision into a directory called nix: $ svn checkout https://svn.cs.uu.nl:12443/repos/trace/nix/trunk nix Likewise, specific releases can be obtained from the tags directory of the repository. If you don't have Subversion, you can also download an automatically generated compressed tar-file of the head revision of the trunk. A fairly recent version of GCC/G++ is required. Version 2.95 and higher should work. To rebuild this manual and the man-pages you need the xmllint and xsltproc, which are part of the libxml2 and libxslt packages, respectively. You also need the DocBook XSL stylesheets and optionally the DocBook XML 4.2 DTD. Note that these are only required if you modify the manual sources or when you are building from the Subversion repository. Nix uses Sleepycat's Berkeley DB, CWI's ATerm library, and SDF parser library. These are included in the Nix source distribution. If you build from the Subversion repository, you must download them yourself and place them in the externals/ directory. See externals/Makefile.am for the precise URLs of these packages. After unpacking or checking out the Nix sources, issue the following commands: $ ./configure options... $ make $ make install When building from the Subversion repository, these should be preceded by the command: $ autoreconf -i The installation path can be specified by passing the --prefix=prefix to configure. The default installation directory is /nix. You can change this to any location you like. You must have write permission to the prefix path. It is advisable not to change the installation prefix from its default, since doing so will in all likelihood make it impossible to use derivations built on other systems. If you want to rebuilt the documentation, pass the full path to the DocBook XML catalog file (docbook.cat) and to the DocBook XSL stylesheets using the --with-docbook-catalog=path and --with-docbook-xsl=path options. To use Nix, some environment variables should be set. In particular, PATH should contain the directories prefix/bin and prefix/var/nix/links/current/bin. The first directory contains the Nix tools themselves, while the second contains to the current user environment (an automatically generated package consisting of symlinks to installed packages). The simplest way to set the required environment variables is to include the file prefix/etc/profile.d/nix.sh in your ~/.bashrc (or similar), like this: . prefix/etc/profile.d/nix.sh