This chapter is for impatient people who don't like reading documentation. For more in-depth information you are kindly referred to and . Download a source tarball or RPM from . Build source distributions using the regular sequence: $ tar xvfj nix-version.tar.bz2 $ ./configure $ make $ make install (as root) This will install Nix in /nix. You should also add /nix/etc/profile.d/nix.sh to your ~/.bashrc (or some other login file). Get some Nix expressions for pre-built packages by downloading the latest nixpkgs distribution (from the same location), and unpack them. $ wget http://.../nix/nixpkgs-version/nixpkgs-version.tar.bz2 $ tar xfj nixpkgs-version.tar.bz2 This will unpack the distribution into a directory nixpkgs-version/. Pull the Nix cache. This ensures that when you install packages they are downloaded in pre-built form from the network, rather than built from source. $ nix-pull http://.../nix/nixpkgs-version/ Note that currently we only pre-build for Linux on x86 platforms. See what's available: $ nix-env -qaf nixpkgs-version/ MozillaFirebird-0.7 hello-2.1.1 docbook-xml-4.2 libxslt-1.1.0 ... Install some packages: $ nix-env -iBf nixpkgs-version/ hello MozillaFirebird ... Test that they work: $ which hello /home/eelco/.nix-userenv/bin/hello $ hello Hello, world! $ MozillaFirebird (read Slashdot or something) Uninstall a package: $ nix-env -e hello If a new release of nixpkgs comes along, you can upgrade all installed packages to the latest versions by downloading and unpacking the new release and doing: $ nix-env -uBf nixpkgs-version/ '*' You should periodically run the Nix garbage collector to get rid of unused packages, since uninstalls or upgrades don't actual delete them: $ nix-collect-garbage | xargs nix-store --delete