Revman is the main programme used by the Cochrane Collaboration for preparing systematic reviews. It is also an extremely useful programme for doing any meta analysis. The programme is closed source, but is freely available from here You need the jave 6 version of the file whic is currently called. RevMan_5_unix_java6.sh
Download the file onto your hard disk. For the sake of this, let’s say it is now saved in download.
I have found installing this in ubuntu incredibly easy. It is quite simply
$ sudo sh RevMan_5_unix_java6.sh
.
Now, for various reasons, mainly about the migration away from gnome, I am not that enamoured with ubuntu. In fedora the situation is more complicated. You need to (a) make the file executable (b) ensure that you have the 32 bit libraries java libraries installed and (c) install as a superuser (or root) if you want any ability to update.
After some experimentation, this can be done with three commands.or five lines.
$ cd ~/Downloads #move to where the file is
$ su #become superuser, without changing where you are
# chmod 755 RevMan_5_unix_java6.sh #change permissions to allow anyone to read and execute the file
(for 64 bit systems only)
# yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk.i686 #installs the 32 bit versions of gnu java 1.5
]# sh RevMan_5_unix_java6.sh #install the file…. which should work.
You will end up with a menu item called “Review Manager 5″ under “other”. There are a couple of traps — in F14 the 32 bit files were recompiled for i686 processors and I’m fairly sure older versions of Fedora compiled to i536 or i386 — if you put the wrong suffix into “yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk.i686″ nothing will happen. (If you are running the 32 bit version of fedora, that line, of course, is redundant, but I run my machines using 64 bit software)
WIth the caveat that I have only tested this on a Fedora XFCE spin system, this may be of some use to people running other red hat based operating systems. I would appreciate comments on this.
.
UPDATE 7 June 2011
Installed Revman v 5.1 onto Fedora 15 Gnome 3. Some issues with gtk missing the pk-gtk and canberra-gtk module, but installed correctly.