Operating system
Taverna Workbench 2.5 is available either in platform-specific or platform-neutral distributions. We generally recommend the platform-specific distributions as they include any required third-party software.
Platform-specific distributions are available for (and tested on):
- Windows 64-bit (.exe installer) (7, 8, 8.1)
- Windows 32-bit (.exe installer) (7)
- Mac OS X 64-bit (.dmg disk image) (10.8, 10.9)
- Linux 64-bit Debian-based (.deb package) (Ubuntu 12.04.4, Bio-Linux 7)
- Linux 64-bit Redhat-based (.rpm package) (Fedora 20)
Platform-neutral distributions are available as:
- Zip file
The platform-neutral distribution has additional system requirements.
Linux: libgnome
If you want to use the Interaction service from Taverna, for some versions of Linux it may be necessary to install the libgnome-2.0 package or equivalent. This library is required to allows Taverna to open pages in your preferred Web browser and connect to the interactive service being called from the workflow.
Memory
It is a good idea for your machine to have at least 2GB of RAM. Taverna will run with less memory than that, but its performance may be affected.
The Taverna Workbench installations for 64-bit operating systems will use by default up to 1 GB of working memory, plus up to 400 MB used by the Java runtime; while installations for 32-bit operating systems and platform-independent installations will use up to 700 MB of working memory, plus up to 200 MB used by Java runtime.
If you need to increase the available memory, for Windows and Linux edit the taverna.vmoptions (and executeworkflow.vmoptions) file inside Taverna’s installation directory (which might require administrator privileges). You can then replace -Xmx700m or -Xmx1g with say -Xmx1500m to use 1.5 GB. For OS X, you would need to modify the Info.plist file (right click on Taverna application in Finder and select Show Package Content and go inside the application bundle to find Contents/Info.plist) and change the same parameter under JavaVM using the Property List Editor. For platform-neutral Taverna installations not using *.vmoptions you may instead have to modify the taverna.sh/taverna.bat (Windows) and executeworkflow.bat/executeworkflow.sh.
