Nix has two components: a 64-bit AMD64 kernel, and a root file tree. You can use the file tree with a regular Plan 9 kernel or with 9vx; from there, you can build a 64-bit kernel.

Downloading the source

This part is simple! Just do

hg clone https://code.google.com/p/nix-os/

If you have a Google account, you can also check out like this:

hg clone https://your_username%40gmail.com@code.google.com/p/nix-os/

This should leave you with a nix-os directory under your current directory.

Using 9vx

You'll need to have 9vx installed. The best option is to download Ron Minnich's repository, build it, and put the 9vx executable somewhere in your path (~/bin/ works well).

Once you have 9vx, you can simply run the start9vx script provided in the root of the Nix repository. This should launch a 9vx window running from the Nix root file tree.

At this point, you are running a full Plan 9 environment with our changes.

Building libraries and kernels

To keep the repository small, Nix does not include prebuilt binary libraries. You'll need to build them yourself before you can compile programs or kernels:

% cd /sys/src % objtype=386 % mk libs % cd ape/lib % mk install

This should give you all you need to compile 386 programs and kernels.

If you want to build an AMD64 kernel, you'll also need to run

% cd /sys/src % objtype=amd64 % mk install

to build all the AMD64 libs and programs. You can then do this to build a CPU kernel and the new PXE loader:

% cd /sys/src/nix/k10 % mk install # this should default to building 9k8cpu % cd ../w/pxeload % mk install

The resulting ppxeload bootloader and 9k8cpu kernel can be used to netboot a 64-bit system.

Staying up to date

If you're not contributing code to Nix, you can simply do hg pull -u to update your repository to the latest version.