Support Blender development by purchasing DVDs or Books in the Blender shop:

Notes:

• The download package contains a blender.html file with installation instructions and a quick survival guide for new users.
• Users with Intel on-board graphics: some graphics operations (menus or border select) don't show due to driver bug.

Regression files are .blend examples showing systematically all features we test before doing a release. This is a good reference for bug hunting, but also a valuable demo overview for new users.

Blender 2.49 regression suite (50+ demo files): NL USA

Blender 2.49 Game Engine regression suite:
NL USA

Blender 2.43 game demos (graphics): NL USA

Blender 2.43 game demos (physics): NL USA

To install Blender, download the appropriate package for your platform to your computer. The Windows version comes with an optional self-extracting installer, for other operating systems you can unpack the compressed file to the location of your choice.  

Provided the Blender binary is in the original extracted directory, Blender will run straight out of the box. No system libraries or system preferences are altered.

Download the md5sums to the same directory as the Blender download and run

$ md5sum -c release249a.md5

to verify the integrity of the download. You can safely ignore the warnings about missing files. (Windows users can do this too with a Cygwin installation, or google for 'md5sum win32').