Installing Bioinformatics Software in a Server-Based Computing Environment

To support a diverse institutional program of genomics projects, it is often necessary to have an equally diverse and comprehensive software base. Although programs may come from many sources, it is important to make them easily accessible to the user community on a single computing platform. This chapter will outline the strategies for installing programs for a server-based molecular biology software resource, accessed by a large user base. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with basic UNIX commands and concepts, as described in the previous chapters. The approaches discussed here are implemented in the BIRCH system ( see Website: http://www.home.cc.umanitoba.ca /~psgendb), but are generally applicable to any centralized multiuser software installation. The important parts of the process are described in either program documentation or UNIX documentation. The tricks and conventions that help to simplify the installation process will also be highlighted. This should give the novice an idea of what to expect before wading through the documentation. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.