# Installation

## Microsoft Windows

SpeedCrunch for Windows requires Windows Vista or newer (32-bit and 64-bit versions). You can use choose to use either the installer or the portable version of SpeedCrunch. Both of these are available from the SpeedCrunch website.

The installer installs SpeedCrunch on your system and creates an entry in the menu to launch it. This process requires administrator rights.

Alternatively, you may use the portable version of SpeedCrunch, which is distributed as a `.zip` archive. This version requires no installation, simply extract it to a folder of your choice and run speedcrunch.exe. In addition, this version of the software is fully portable: It stores all its settings and user data next to the executable so the entire directory can be copied to another computer and run there.

## Linux

On Linux, there are two main ways to install SpeedCrunch: Either install the package provided by your distribution, if any, or install the binary packages from the SpeedCrunch website.

### Distribution Packages

Many Linux distributions already include packages for SpeedCrunch in their repositories. The exact steps to install these depend on the distribution. For example, on Debian and Ubuntu, the included SpeedCrunch package can be installed by running this command:

    sudo apt-get install speedcrunch

On Fedora, this command will install SpeedCrunch:

    sudo yum install speedcrunch

Check your system’s documentation to find out how to install additional packages. Many desktop distributions also include graphical package management software that can be used to install SpeedCrunch.

### Generic Packages

New in version 0.12: The generic Linux packages are available starting with SpeedCrunch 0.12.

As an alternative to distribution packages, Linux binary packages of SpeedCrunch are available on the SpeedCrunch website. They are generic packages that are built to be compatible with many different Linux systems. As a rule of thumb, they are likely to work on most Linux distributions released since around 2010; however, due to the wide variety and flexibility of Linux systems, this is only a best-effort endeavor and never guaranteed. Additionally, due to the generic nature of the packages, they may not integrate as well with the system as your distribution’s packages; in particular, they won’t adapt as well to the visual style of your desktop environment. In general, if there’s a SpeedCrunch package available from your distribution, that will likely work better for your system than these generic packages, but it may be an older version.

There’s choice of three different types of packages per architecture (32-bit or 64-bit); which one is right for you depends on your system:

- Use the `.deb` packages for Debian and derived distributions, like Ubuntu.
- Use the `.rpm` packages for RPM-based systems like Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS, openSUSE or Mageia.

The exact steps for installing the package again depend on your system. Most desktop Linux distributions include a graphical utility to install package files from the file manager.

If neither of these fit your system, there are also `.tar.bz2` archives that simply contain the binary. The contents can be copied to any directory and the speedcrunch binary can be run from there.

## Development Builds

Warning Development builds of SpeedCrunch may not be as stable or well-tested as released versions and may contain changes that break your session history. Use them at your own risk.

Pre-built development versions of SpeedCrunch allow you to use newer features and bug-fixes before they become available in a release, without having to compile SpeedCrunch yourself. Currently, automatically updated development builds of SpeedCrunch are available for the following platforms:

- Windows
- Ubuntu (14.04 and later)

## Building from Source

The SpeedCrunch source code is maintained on Bitbucket in a Git repository. Clone the repository onto your machine by running the following command:

    git clone https://bitbucket.org/heldercorreia/speedcrunch.git

The main readme file (`README.md` at the root of the repository) contains instructions on how to compile SpeedCrunch.