Tuning Up Your Hardware

You can develop Android applications on various operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. In this book, you find a combination of the Windows 7 operating system and Mac OS X, but you can use Linux as well.

Operating system

Android supports these platforms:

Windows XP or later

Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later (x86 only)

Ubuntu Linux

Note that 64-bit Linux distributions must be capable of running 32-bit applications. Visit http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing/index.html for more details.

Throughout this book, some examples use Windows 7 64-bit Edition. Windows paths look similar to this:

c:path ofile.txt

Some examples use Mac OS X; a Mac or Linux path looks similar to this:

/path/to/file.txt

Computer hardware

Before you start installing the required software, make sure that your computer can run it adequately. Just about any desktop or laptop computer manufactured in the past four years will suffice. A laptop with a 1.6GHz Pentium D processor with 1GB of RAM running Windows XP and Windows 7 can run and debug Eclipse applications with no problem. (Eclipse — the software you use to develop your applications — should run smoothly on whatever computer you use.)

To ensure that you can install all the tools and frameworks you’ll need, make sure that you have enough hard drive space to accommodate them. The Android developer site has a list of hardware requirements, outlining how much hard drive space each component requires, at http://developer.android.com/sdk/requirements.html .

To save you time, you need about 3GB of free hard drive space to install all the tools and frameworks necessary to develop Android applications.