This section contains installation notes for the various parts of OME. Before beginning the installation process, you might want to read the System overview section for an introduction to the OME system's design.

A plain-text version of these instructions is also available in the source OME distribution under the docs directory. You can also view this text version here.

The following installation notes apply to the Open Microscopy Environment 2.4 series and the 2.5 series on CVS. If you find any errors or possible omissions, please report them via the mailing lists.

Every OME installation must have a single data server, and at least one image server. These can all be on the same machine, or on separate machines. Our installation process is currently geared more towards a single-machine installation, with one data server and one image server. ("Server" in this sense refers to a server program, not a server machine.) Other arrangements should work, but might require more tweaking of the installation process.

If you plan to use the Web interface to access OME, you will also need to install the Web server on the same machine as the data server. All of these server processes will run inside of Apache, and the OME installation script should take care of setting up your Apache configuration files as appropriate.

If you plan to use the Java interface to access OME, you have two options. You can either compile the client program yourself, or download the pre-compiled JAR files from our server. You will then have to distribute the JAR files (whether compiled or downloaded) to all of the client machines at your site.

Recommended/Supported Operating Systems

OME software consists of UNIX-based, databased-backed web-services, and is therefore a significant piece of IT infrastructure relying on many components other than those provided by OME. There are currently too many UNIX variants to count, and many of them can run OME. In order to limit the number of variables, we recommend the following operating systems. Other operating systems can likely be made to work, but they will also likely require considerable familiarity with the specific operating system and with UNIX in general.

• OS X: Versions 10.3 (Panther) and 10.4 (Tiger). An installation wizard for OME 2.6.0 is available. This installer will install all software dependencies (i.e. Postgres) as well as OME itself. All code will run natively on PPC and Intel architectures.
• Fedora Core 4: This is the recommended Linux distribution for installing OME. Other Linux distributions may work (i.e. Debian, other Red Hat distributions), but may or may not result in problems. Distributions other than Fedora Core are supported on a "best effort" basis. Disk images (ISOs) are available from Red Hat for installing FC4 on 32-bit and 64-bit Intel/AMD x86 systems.

Developer's Installation

There are two ways to install the OME server: standard installation and developer's installation. These differ in the location of the files used to drive OME.

• Standard Installation: Files placed under /OME will be used.
• Developer's Installation: Files in the current directory - i.e., the directory in which the installation is being run - will be used.

The use of the current directory allows developers to make changes to Perl code and templates stored locally, without having to either re-install the system after each edit or directly modify files under /OME.

Please note that although the developer's installation eliminates the need to reinstall the server before seeing the impact of code modifications, the Apache server should be restarted before any changes are tested. This will force the loading of the new, modified code.

This option is preferable for anyone who will be modifying OME code. Instructions for installing a developer's installation can be found with the server-side installation instructions.

For Additional Assistance

As always, if you have any problems with any part of these instructions, feel free to email the developers via the mailing lists.