Virtual Machine

Many of the tools mentioned on this wiki require a particular system to run. Usually Linux but some require Windows.

If you want to try the tools and don't want to re-install your PC there are virtualization solutions that allow you to run another system without even rebooting. Such solutions include VirtualBox, VMWARE Player, Parallels, and others. Make sure that your chosen virtualizations solution gives you access to the needed devices. You will probably want a way to access a SD card reader and/or USB devices from the virtual machine.

If you want to install Linux to build your own images the recommended distribution is Ubuntu 64bit 12.04 or 13.04. You will need about 20G of disk space for the virtual machine. Most virtualization solutions are capable of creating dynamically expanding virtual disks that have a hard limit on size but take up only space actually used by the virtual machine so you can set the limit higher without wasting disk space.