BIRT prerequisites
BIRT has a fairly small set of requirements to run, depending on one's needs.
Software requirements
There are no specific operating system requirements to run BIRT as it is a Java application and it should run on any platform that Java will run on. For the BIRT Report Designer, any platform that runs Eclipse will work. I have successfully run and developed reports under Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX.
Note
A fair word of warning to the Mac folks: In the past I have run into some performance issues running BIRT under OSX. It has been a few years and this may not be the case anymore, but I would like to put this forth as a cautionary note. If performance of BIRT is poor under OSX, it might be advisable to try to run this tool under a Linux or Windows setup using Parallels or VMWare.
Hardware requirements
As far as hardware requirements, I would recommend at least a Pentium 3 processor with minimum of 512 MB of RAM for the BIRT Report Designer to function without problems. The...