Tuning Up Your Hardware

You can develop Android applications on various operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. I do the development in this book on a Windows 7 operating system and Mac OS X, but you can develop using Linux instead.

Operating system

Android supports all the following platforms:

• Windows XP (32-bit), Vista (32- or 64-bit), and 7 (32- or 64-bit)
• Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later (x86 only)
• Linux (tested on Ubuntu Linux, Lucid Lynx)

Note that 64-bit distributions must be capable of running 32-bit applications.

/path/to/file.txt

If you're using a Windows machine, however, your paths will look similar to this:

c:path	ofile.txt

Computer hardware

Before you start installing the required software, make sure that your computer can run it adequately. I think it's safe to say that just about any desktop or laptop computer manufactured in the past four years will suffice. I wish I could be more exact, but I can't; the hardware requirements for Android simply weren't published when I wrote this book. The slowest computer that I have run Eclipse (the Android development environment) on a laptop with a 1.6-GHz Pentium D processor with 1 GB of RAM. I've run this same configuration under Windows XP and Windows 7, and both operating systems combined with that hardware can run and debug Eclipse applications with no problems.

To ensure that you can install all the tools and frameworks you'll need, make sure that you have enough disk 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.