Nix uses Sleepycat's Berkeley DB and CWI's ATerm library. However, these are fetched automatically as part of the build process. Other than that, you need a good C++ compiler. GCC 2.95 does not appear to work; please use GCC 3.x. 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 http://losser.st-lab.cs.uu.nl:12080/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 download a compressed tar-file of the latest revision of the repository. To build Nix, do the following: $ autoreconf -i $ ./configure options... $ make $ make install Currently, the only useful switch for configure is --prefix=prefix to specify where Nix is to be installed. The default installation directory is /nix. You can change this to any location you like. You should ensure that you have write permission to the installation prefix. It is advisable not to change the installation prefix, since doing so will in all likelihood make it impossible to use derivates built on other systems.