System requirements

First, we need a computer.

Okay, yeah, but Celtx fits a much wider range of computers than most software; certainly more than the big commercial packages that only work on PC or Mac. Unless you're still running an Apple II from 1980, chances are Celtx has you covered.

The very best thing about Celtx is that it's free! There are two definitions of free that people throw around—free beer and free speech. Celtx is free in both ways. There's no cost for Celtx, like free beer, and you can do whatever you want with it, within certain limits, like free speech. Later, we'll talk about other additional services and products that are almost free, but for now, Celtx is free.

Note

Unlike commercial scriptwriting software, which limits you to only one or two active installations on one type of operating system, you can install Celtx on as many computers as you have with no limits whatsoever on how many run at a time.

By the way, Celtx requires 75 MB of free hard disk space for installation. In these days of multi-hundred-gigabyte disks, this is a very light footprint indeed.

PC

Any relatively recent PC from the last ten years or so handles Celtx with no problem. Celtx runs on XP, NT, 2000, Vista, and the latest, Windows 7.

Mac

Just about any Apple Mac OS X (also know as Tiger) machine since 2002, runs Celtx. Celtx is a universal binary, meaning it works equally well on X86 (Intel based) or Power PC Macs.

Linux

Hundreds of Linux distributions or distros (versions of Linux from different groups or companies) exist. Celtx works fine on pretty much all of them (at least all the X6 or Intel processor machines) so long as certain supporting library packages (collections of common routines programs needed to operate) are installed. Don't worry, this takes about ten seconds, and we'll check and do this, if needed, in this chapter concerning installation of Celtx on Linux.

eeePC

Since 2008, Netbooks (subcompact notebook computers) have been available. Many of the earlier ones run Windows XP, although more recent offerings provide Vista or even Windows 7. Netbooks also might have various "lite" versions of Linux. Celtx loves them all, and we'll sort this out in the eeePC installation section forthcoming in this very chapter.

So, let's download Celtx and install it.