Download and Get Started with Mininet!

The easiest way to get started is to download a pre-packaged Ubuntu VM. This VM includes a modified kernel, all OpenFlow binaries and tools pre-installed, plus tweaks to the kernel to support larger Mininet networks.

VM installation is strongly recommended over a native install. In practice, the speed difference is minimal and installation is much faster, since the kernel does not need to be recompiled to add Network Namespace support. For those who want a custom installation, see the MininetVMCreationNotes and README/INSTALL files in the Mininet source.

Now, follow these steps for a VM install:

1. Download the Mininet VM from http://www.openflow.org/downloads/OpenFlowTutorial-101311.zip (current VirtualBox image - an older VMware image is available at http://openflowswitch.org/downloads/OpenFlowTutorial-081910.vmware.zip.) This will take some time. It's ~800MB-1GB, compressed.
2. Download and install VirtualBox (free, GPL) or Qemu for any platform, VMware Workstation for Windows or Linux, or VMware Fusion for Mac, KVM (free, GPL) for Linux .
3. Sign up for the mininet-discuss mailing list at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/mininet-discuss. This is the source for Mininet support.
4. Run through the MininetVMSetupNotes to log in to the VM and install Mininet code on it.
5. Follow the MininetWalkthrough to get familiar with Mininet commands and typical usage.

The source code is now on GitHub at http://github.com/mininet/mininet.