Technical requirements
You will need a modern and preferably powerful desktop PC or laptop. Ubuntu Desktop specifies some recommended minimum system requirements for the installation and usage of the distribution here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements. I would definitely suggest you go with a system well beyond the minimum recommendations – as powerful a system as you can afford to use. This is because performing tasks such as building a Linux kernel from source is a very memory- and CPU-intensive process. It should be pretty obvious that the more RAM, CPU power, and disk space the host system has, the better!
Like any seasoned kernel developer, I would say that working on a native Linux system is best. However, for this book, we cannot assume that you will always have a dedicated native Linux box available to you. So, we shall assume that you are working on a Linux guest. Working within a guest VM also adds an additional layer of isolation...
