Download

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 (1GB to do anything useful) and start the live CD again and run setup. Please note that on x86, MINIX3 does not support USB at all (yet!). Proceed as follows:

• Read the installation guide.
• If you do not know how to partition a hard disk, print and read this short tutorial.
• Please take our short survey after installing 3.3.0.

• 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.
• Reboot the computer with the CD-ROM device and follow the instructions in the installation guide.
• If you are using VirtualBox and have trouble booting the system, follow the instructions here.

We have prebuilt images.

• 3.3.0 BBXM image
• 3.3.0 Beaglebone black & beaglebone white image

To crossbuild for ARM, see here to see all the steps.

Development snapshots are available at the dev snapshots page.

For older versions of MINIX, please see the previous versions page.

For a list of known bugs in releases, see the known bugs list.

The best known lossless compression algorithm is implemented in the bzip2 program. It also has extremely fast decompression. 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.