This quick lesson speaks to the System Requirements for installing the MySQL 5.5 software for use with this course. So, what do we need in terms of equipment and software to participate in this course? Basically, we just need a fairly recent computer running a fairly recent version of a commonly used operating system. The three most common operating systems on which MySQL runs are Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, but Solaris and FreeBSD are also supported. While there are many and various flavors of Linux, there is a distribution of MySQL available for most of them, certainly the most common ones. The easiest way to see whether MySQL is available for your computer is to go to this webpage location, that's dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql. It should recognize your operating system automatically in most cases and will show you the options available to you. Otherwise, there's a drop-down list for selecting from among the supported operating systems and it will show you a list of installers for that operating system. Windows users will note that no distinction is made between Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, MySQL only distinguishes between 32-bit and 64-bit hardware for the Windows platform. So any of those installers should work no matter which operating system you're using. Mac OS X users will note that the current version of MySQL is only compiled for Intel machines, so those still clinging to their old PowerPC Macs are out of luck for MySQL 5. And for version 5.5 there are separate installers for the 10.5 and 10.6 Versions of the operating system, that's Leopard and Snow Leopard, but not for the earlier ones. MySQL 5.1 is also available for Mac OS X version 10.4, and then again we have 32-bit and 64-bit versions for those different hardware platforms. We will go over this again briefly in the chapter on installation; I just wanted to warn those with older machines who haven't upgraded their operating system in many years that they might have to move forward to play with us in this course. The MySQL engineering team can only spend time tweaking the code and compiling for just so many operating systems, they had to draw the line somewhere. Ultimately it is up to Oracle, as to which platforms and how many generations back on each of them, they will support with MySQL from now on. As new versions of MySQL beyond 5.5 are released the list of supported hardware and operating systems will most likely shift as older machines and software become obsolete. In the next lesson we will take a little stroll through the history of MySQL.
| Course: | MySQL 5 Development (Part 1) |
| Author: | David Swain |
| SKU: | 34225 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-93-3 |
| Release Date: | 2011-05-27 |
| Duration: | 11 hrs / 129 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |