Downloading MINIX 3 (CD images and USB stick images)

Trying MINIX 3 is easy. You just download the compressed CD image file, decompress it, and burn it to a CD-ROM. This CD is a live CD. You can boot your computer from it and a few seconds later you log in as root. You do not have to install MINIX 3 to the hard disk to test it. If you decide you want to install it, you then have to create a hard disk partition for it (100 MB to 1000 MB will do) start the live CD again and run setup. Proceed as follows:

• Download and print the setup guide in PostScript or PDF (or view it on line)
• If you do not know how to partition a hard disk, print and read this short tutorial on disk partitions
• Download a MINIX 3 distribution from the table below. We have CD-ROM ISO images and a USB storage device image. If you have a CD-ROM drive: most computers have an IDE CD-ROM, but some notebooks have a USB CD-ROM. If you are not sure, try IDE; if it fails to boot, try USB. The hard disk must be an IDE hard disk. See below about bz2 vs. zip compression.

  The Memory stick image is an image you can copy straight to a USB storage device. If your BIOS supports it, you can boot from it and use it as a live system, or to make installations from.

  The 3.1.2a release date is 29 may 2006.

  The 3.1.3 release date is 13 april 2007. On 8 june 2007, 3.1.3a, containing some fixes to 3.1.3, was released. For more information, see the release notes.

• To run MINIX on VMware, please see this page: MINIX 3 on VMWare. For recent versions of vmware, you have to apply a workaround. See this newsgroup message. This is fixed in the current Minix code.
   
  

  Version	IDE CD-ROM	USB CD-ROM	USB Memory Stick
  3.1.2a	IDE-3.1.2a.bz2   (296 MB)   IDE-3.1.2a.zip   (298 MB)	USB-3.1.2a.bz2   (294 MB)   USB-3.1.2a.zip   (295 MB)	usb_image-3.1.2a.bz2   (293 MB)   usb_image-3.1.2a.zip   (293 MB)
  3.1.3a (release notes)	minix3_1_3a_ide.iso.bz2   (532 MB)
  3.1.4-pre (4220) interim release	minix3_1_4_ide_r4220.iso   (559 MB)
  3.1.0 book version	minix-3.1.0-book.iso.bz2

  
  
  

  Filename	MD5 checksum
  IDE-3.1.2a.iso.bz2	ac83e516f9f1451ab9579872b1fcdc09
  IDE-3.1.2a.iso.zip	4072ad765971810ca2a4da64a62d382d
  USB-3.1.2a.iso.bz2	ad8b8430380c902c59b2bd66c29aa240
  USB-3.1.2a.iso.zip	ee0eeaa3213916d9ec7c38185077ca3b
  usb_image-3.1.2a.bz2	fef7a4c10267d03fc8ee24a3ca70556d
  usb_image-3.1.2a.zip	468e610d1aff65ac98c8f77bf7e47cd9
  minix3_1_3a_ide.iso	b38e711a111054bf805030a52dd4b377
  minix3_1_3a_ide.iso.bz2	fed381692a83bf42ba20bff4653eef37

  
   
  
• Decompress the downloaded file to get a .iso file and the Installation guide (same as above)
• Burn this bootable CD-image file to a CD-ROM, or copy the USB image to an USB device.
• Reboot the computer with the CD-ROM/USB device and follow the instructions in the installation guide

Source of -current

Previous Versions

Known bugs

Speed Up Your Download

The best known lossless compression algorithm is implemented in the bzip2 program. It also has extremely fast decompression. Since the MINIX 3 CD-ROM image is quite large, we recommend your getting the bz2 version to speed up your download and to lighten the load on our servers. The popular 7zip archiver for Windows supports it too.

If you do not have the compression (bzip2) and decompression (bunzip2) software, here it is for Windows, Linux, and Solaris. Here is the source tarball. Bzip2 is also contained in the MINIX 3 distribution. The zip versions are provided as emergency backup in case you cannot get bzip2 running.

Booting MINIX 3 on Old Computers

Some older computers have a CD-ROM drive but are not able to boot from it. To boot MINIX 3 on them, download bootflop.img. It is a floppy disk image file. Copy it to a blank formatted floppy byte for byte using RawWrite. Then insert the CD-ROM in the drive and boot the computer using the floppy. This procedure is equivalent to booting from the CD-ROM itself.

Power PC Port

We started but did not yet finish a port to the Apple G4 Power PC. Here is what we have so far. Volunteers to finish it are most welcome.