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Screening Assistant 2

Installation guide

Last edited: 04/11/2011
By: VLG
Sourceforge: SA2 website
Help: SA2 forums
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This page will guide through the basic steps needed to install SA2. SA2 requires several external tools that cannot be distributed and installed directly, so you will have to install them yourself. Fortunately, these tools are quite easy to deal with, and probably already installed on your computer!

Table of Contents

  1. Requirements
  2. Installing JAVA
  3. Installing MySQL
  4. Installing SA2
  5. Post-installation notes what is intalled behind your back; what can be changed before running SA2

1) Requirements - top

SA2 needs (1) a JAVA runtime environment (version 1.5 at least), and (2) a MySQL Server installed and running on your computer (or another computer that can be accessed from the network). So far, we have used SA2 using MySQL servers version 5.* without any particular trouble. Like most research teams, we don't have much time, and thus we cannot guarantee that SA2 will run correctly on older version of MySQL.

In terms of operating systems, we have successfully tested SA2 under the following configurations:

Unfortunately, life is sometimes unfair, and we cannot garantee either that everything will be fine on more exotic architectures. The last couple of years, we experienced surprising problems dues to OS specific differences, in particular with MySQL. We hope that most of them have been fixed, but you know... :)

Also, it is a good idea to have a lot of memory on your computer :) by default SA2 will allocate 512 MB of memory. If you need more, or if you experience any memory issue, you can increase the memory allocated to SA2. See the Good-to-know section to learn how to do so.



2) Installing JAVA - top

You need a Java Runtime Environment 1.5 installed on your machine to run SA2. There is a good chance that JAVA is already installed on your computer (type "java -version" in a console to see if it is the case, or just run SA2 and see what happens). If not, just follow the instructions provided by the Oracle website. You will want to download the JRE only, or the JDK and the Netbeans IDE if you plan to make some development based on SA2. See the developper documentation for more information.



3) Installing MySQL - top

Installing a clean, working MySQL server is certainly the most sensible point here.

The best we can do is to point you out to the website of mysql, to download and install the MySQL server. All installation instructions are available in the official online documentation. If you are in charge of installing the MySQL Server, we recommand you to read carefully the installation instructions corresponding to your OS, as well as the post-installation instructions.

There are also a huge number of tutorials on how to perform a basic installation of a mysql server, e.g. here for windows, here for ubuntu.

As an alternative, you can use the all-in-one solutions such as EasyPHP or WampServer, which have the advantage of providing graphical user interfaces to perform administration operations, or even executing your own SQL queries.

Finally, remember that you will have to create a new user having the appropriate rights (reading and writing) to be able to create and populate new SA2 databases. You can find out how to do this by reading the MySQL Server Administration documentation, and in particular in the section describing how to add a new user to a MySQL server (or alternatively, use the administration tools cited previously).

If you plan to setup a very large database, please have a look at the MySQL and large databases section. The default parameters of MySQL are uysually not suited for large databases.



4) Installing SA2 - top

Installing SA2 is fairly simple. Currently, you simply have to download a zip archive (and of course all the documentation) at the sourceforge server. Once done, just unzip the archive, and you will be able to run the software (binaries are located in the $SA/bin directory).

User-friendly installers are in preparation and will be available soon (some marvin modules included in our in-house version has to be removed first).



5) Post-installation notes - top

You are basically done here, you can start playing with the software, or maybe read about the important terminologies used in SA2, and follow the quickstart guide to learn the basics of the software.

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