3.1. Downloading Bochs

You can download Bochs from our web site at bochs.sourceforge.net. First, you need to choose what version to get: a recent release or a development version. If you trying to get things working for the first time, a release version is recommended since it has been tested the most. The development versions may have some newer bug fixes and new features, but have not been tested as much as the releases. A snapshot of the current state of the source tree in ZIP format is available on GitHub when you press the Code button.

Second, you can choose to compile Bochs from source code or install a binary (if one is available for your platform). Binary packages will be quicker to install, and most include a small demo of a guest operating system called DLX Linux to get you started. However, some features can only be enabled if you compile Bochs yourself, for example the Bochs debugger. For multiuser systems, you will probably need system administrator privileges (root) to install a binary package. If you decide to get a binary, download it to your hard disk, uncompress it, then go to the section called Installing a Binary for more information.

If you are going to compile Bochs yourself, you need the gzipped tarball containing the source code, called bochs-version.tar.gz. For Windows a ZIP package with sources and prebuilt Makefiles is available. To unpack a compressed TAR file[1] on a Unix machine[2] , type

  gunzip -c bochs-version.tar.gz | tar -xvf -

This creates a directory called bochs-version full of files. This directory will be referred to as $BOCHS. Go into $BOCHS and you are ready to compile. Instructions for compiling Bochs are in the section, Compiling Bochs.

Alternatively, you can also obtain the sources for any Bochs version using GIT. See the GIT instructions for details.