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.
| 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
A gzipped tar archive of the current source (updated daily form
the subversion repository) is available in this
source tarball.
Previous Versions
For older versions of MINIX, please see the previous versions page.
Known bugs
For a list of known bugs in releases, see the known bugs list.
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.
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