# qooxdoo

Home » Manual (v2.1.1) » Tooling » SDK Requirements

# SDK Requirements

qooxdoo offers a platform-independent and user-friendly tool chain, in form of an SDK. It comes with the qx.Desktop and qx.Mobile downloads. For those components you use it for creating and developing a qooxdoo application. It is not needed for running the application. For the qx.Website and qx.Server components there are pre-build libraries to download, so you don't need the SDK.

## Python

The tool chain only requires a Python installation. Use a standard Python 2.x release, version 2.5 or above. Python 3 is currently not supported. (If in doubt you can query the version of your local Python installation by running the command `python -V`). As a qooxdoo user you do not need any Python knowledge, it is merely a technology used internally for the tools. Python comes either pre-installed on many systems or it can be installed very easily:

### Windows

It is trivial! Just download and install the excellent ActivePython package. Its default settings of the installation wizard are fine, there is nothing to configure. You can as well use the Windows package from Python.org, but this might require additional manual configuration.

### Cygwin

Cygwin can be used as an optional free and powerful Unix-like environment for Windows. You won't need a native Python installation, just make sure to include Cygwin's built-in Python as an additional package when using Cygwin's setup program.

### Mac

Python is pre-installed on Max OS X. No additional software needs to be installed, but on older systems it might need an update.

### Linux

Python often comes pre-installed with your favorite distribution, just make sure they're still using a Python 2.x version. If not, simply use your package manager to install a suitable package.

## Disk Space

The unpacked SDK will require around 110 MB disk space (a big part of this is due to media files like images).

During runtime the tool chain also uses a subdirectory in your system's `TMP` path, to cache intermediate results and downloaded files. Depending on your activities this cache directory can become between 0.5 and 1.5 GB in size. If the default cache path does not suite you, you can change it in your configuration.

## Installation and Setup

Installation of the SDK is just going to the download section and grab the package suitable for your purpose. Choose either the Desktop or Mobile download, which both come as an SDK archive. Unzip it to a suitable path on your hard disk. The archive contains a single top-level folder, which in turn contains all the SDK's files and sub-folders.

This is all as far as the SDK is concerned. As an additional convenience you might want to add the `<sdk-root-path>/tool/bin` directory to your system environment `PATH` variable. This is a prerequisite for invoking the executable programs of the tool chain without the need to address them with their path.

## Installation Troubleshooting

- SDK Installation Troubleshooting