# Obtaining NixOS

NixOS ISO images can be downloaded from the NixOS download page. There are a number of installation options. If you happen to have an optical drive and a spare CD, burning the image to CD and booting from that is probably the easiest option. Most people will need to prepare a USB stick to boot from. Unetbootin is recommended and the process is described in brief below. Note that systems which use UEFI require some additional manual steps. If you run into difficulty a number of alternative methods are presented in the NixOS Wiki.

As an alternative to installing NixOS yourself, you can get a running NixOS system through several other means:

- Using virtual appliances in Open Virtualization Format (OVF) that can be imported into VirtualBox. These are available from the NixOS download page.

- Using AMIs for Amazon’s EC2. To find one for your region and instance type, please refer to the list of most recent AMIs.

- Using NixOps, the NixOS-based cloud deployment tool, which allows you to provision VirtualBox and EC2 NixOS instances from declarative specifications. Check out the NixOps homepage for details.