To build a complex system such as Android, we need to satisfy a few hardware and software requirements. First of all the host system.

The official Linux distribution supporting the Android build environment is Ubuntu Linux. Google periodically releases new Android builds for its devices and all of them are created using Ubuntu. Currently, Google is using Ubuntu 14.04 even if this is not the latest version available.

Every example in this book will be developed and executed on a common notebook, with an Intel i5 CPU and 4 GB of RAM, running Ubuntu Linux 15.05, that's the latest available version. Using a different Linux version proves that if all the requirements are satisfied, you could build Android with any Linux distribution or even Mac OS X— if you can't set up Ubuntu, trying with a different version will be challenging, but will be worth trying, as a learning experience.

If you are a Microsoft Windows user, it is sad to say, you won't be able to build Android...