There's confusion here, and I am partly to blame ... if you get googlecode.com/p/nix-os
you'll get a file system image that will be usable on a 32-bit machine. We use it with 9vx. That image includes all the bits you need to build and boot a NIX kernel. The intent of this distro is to allow 32-bit users to create 64-bit kernels and test. So the nix-os repo is designed to let you set up on a 32-bit machine and bootstrap a separate 64-bit machine. We thus envision you having more than one system available. I use it as follows: hg clone http://googlecode.com/p/nix-os nix-os cd nix-os ./9vx.OSX10.6 -r . -u rminnich (get on the machine) objtype=386 cd /sys/src/ape/lib mk install cd /sys/src objtype=amd64 mk install cd /sys/src/nix/k10 mk install You are then good to go, unless I missed a step. You need some 386 bits from ape to build the 64-bit code. We've set up nix-os root file system to play nice with 9vx, which is why we include a 9vx for osx in the file system. so to repeat: nix-os is a mercurial image of a root file system for 32-bit nodes, and it is intended to make it easy for you to boot 64-bit nodes. We assumed that you had at least one 32-bit and one 64-bit system. I hope this helps a little. ron