EPrints uses a number of established and freely available tools and libraries. Most will come with your operating system, and the rest are available for free download.
Operating System
EPrints can run on any UNIX-like system. We recommend RedHat Enterprise 3 (Linux). Users have reported successful installations on RedHat Fedora, Solaris, Debian, SUSE and OSX.
Perl
EPrints is tested using Perl 5.6 and 5.8.1. It should work with newer versions of Perl 5. It will not (currently) work with Perl 6.
Additional Perl Modules
EPrints uses a number of 3rd party Perl Modules. Most of these come with RedHat Linux, all are freely available from CPAN. The EPrints distribution includes a script which you can run to download and install any required modules from CPAN.
Apache Web Server
EPrints uses the Apache Web Server and mod_perl. EPrints will work with both Apache 1.3 and Apache 2. We recommend Apache 2.
MySQL Database
EPrints uses MySQL database as a back-end. This is a very fast SQL server. MySQL 3, 4 and 4.1 should work with the latest version of EPrints.
Other Tools
EPrints uses a few command line tools to perform certain functions. If they are not installed then EPrints can work without them, but a feature will be unavailable.
wget
Downloads URLs. This allows users to add files to an EPrint from a URL instead of uploading them from their harddrive.
Comes with RedHat Linux.
lynx
Used to convert HTML documents to text, for full-text indexing.
Comes with RedHat Linux.
pdftotext (part of the xpdf RPM package)
Used to convert PDF documents to text, for full-text indexing.
Comes with RedHat Linux.
wvText (part of the wv RPM package)
Used to convert Microsoft Word documents to text, for full-text indexing.
Does not with RedHat Linux, but can easily be installed.
Latex Style Equations
A few physics related repositories use a feature which converts latex equations in titles into rendered images. See the full install documentation for info on the additional tools required for this. If in doubt, you don't need this feature.