System Requirements

Supported Systems

The following platforms are officially supported:

• OpenBSD (4.3)
• Linux (Debian Lenny, Ubuntu 8.04, Fedora 9, Red Hat/CentOS 5.2, Slackware 12, Arch Linux)
• NetBSD (this has minor issues with dates on symlinks)
• FreeBSD (7.0)
• Mac OS X (10.5)
• Microsoft Windows (2000 and XP)
• Solaris (!OpenSolaris)

If you have a supported system then installing and using Box Backup should be easy. Installation instructions are available for all supported platforms. If you have an issue with a supported platform, you can expect prompt assistance from the user community in resolving it.

Other Platforms

Box Backup is highly portable and likely to work on most Unix systems. However, the fact that your platform is not yet supported probably means that we don't have the resources, experience or skills to support it ourselves.

If you want to run Box Backup on such a platform, you are welcome and encouraged to do so. It's more likely that you will need to be a developer and help to resolve any issues yourself. We welcome contributions, patches and assistance to support other platforms, especially volunteers to maintain support for them, and we will help where possible.

However, please note that each additional platform adds to the amount of work needed to test each release, and therefore slows down development. Unless someone volunteers to maintain the port, it's unlikely that we will add your platform to the list of supported platforms.

Programmers notes describing how everything works are included in the notes directory within the distribution archive (or browse it online at source:box/trunk/docs/api-docs). The following pages may also be of interest:

• Source Code Repository
• Coding Style
• Current Development Progress
• Future Development Plans
• Betas and Release Candidates

As you will likely need to modify the source code, at least slightly, to build on an unsupported platform, we recommend that you download the very latest code from the source code repository, which will make it easier for you to submit patches and for us to accept them.