System Requirements for ROM Development?

[TrikkJames]

I'm just gonna go out and say it. When it comes to ROM development, I'm a complete noob. However I learn extremely fast, and once I learn, I make amazing things.

I love Android. I love Android hacking. I love the utilization of custom ROMs. And now, I want to love ROM development.

But maybe my computer can't do it? Not sure. It's an Acer Aspire 5000 from 2006 currently running Windows 7 Ultimate and I keep it in safe mode to run faster. It has 512mb RAM I believe.

What are the system requirements of developing a ROM?

 

[Golfdriver97]

I know you will need a lot of free drive space. Beyond that I am not sure.

 

[zkSharks]

There's a basic system requirements list over at the Android Developers site's SDK Tools section. I'm not aware of any listed system requirements for Android Studio, but they may be out there. You're probably going to have a hard time working within that 512MB memory constraint, though. Android Studio is currently sitting at around 1.2GB with two moderately-sized projects open, though I don't have Eclipse installed on this machine to compare to.

I would be looking for 10-20GB of free drive space for a "comfortable" Android developer tools installation, to allow for large projects, additional libraries, etc. My installation is right at 10GB now.

 

[TrikkJames]

There's a basic system requirements list over at the Android Developers site's SDK Tools section. I'm not aware of any listed system requirements for Android Studio, but they may be out there. You're probably going to have a hard time working within that 512MB memory constraint, though. Android Studio is currently sitting at around 1.2GB with two moderately-sized projects open, though I don't have Eclipse installed on this machine to compare to.

I would be looking for 10-20GB of free drive space for a "comfortable" Android developer tools installation, to allow for large projects, additional libraries, etc. My installation is right at 10GB now.

By the way I just bumped up my VM on the computer would that work? Virtual memory is now at 4gb average and 12gb max (I really don't know if it works like that, I haven't noticed a speed boost).

I would run Linux but all distros seem to have problems installing on there so I'm stuck with Windows.

 

[Rukbat]

If you're talking about a RAMdisk (using part of the hard drive as memory), you probably won't have the patience to wait for the computer to do anything - it'll be like entering the Indy 500 on a tricycle. I'd go with a minimum of 2GB of actual physical RAM. And not run anything else while I was doing development. Watching a hard drive swap the world in and out is worse than watching grass grow. You don't need blazing speed. My development machine (once I get it unpacked) runs a dual core 2GHz CPU, 4GB of RAM and a 500GB drive. But 512MB of physical RAM? Your drive will be doing a lot of thrashing and swapping.