HUBzero is a platform used to create dynamic web sites for scientific research and educational activities. With HUBzero, you can easily publish your research software and related educational materials on the web. Powerful middleware serves up interactive simulation and modeling tools via your web browser. These tools can connect you with rendering farms and powerful Grid computing resources.

HUBzero installations require one or more dedicated physical hosts running Debian GNU/Linux 6.0. In particular there are version specific requirements on mysql (5.1), python (2.6) and php (5.3).

Other debian based distributions might theoretically work with some modification, although they would be totally unsupported.

A typical starter HUBzero installation might consist of a single physical server with dual 64-bit quad-core CPUs, 16 Gigabytes of RAM and a terabyte of disk.

It is possible to run HUBzero inside of a virtual machine such as ones created by VMware and VirtualBox. While fully functional there will be significant performance and resource limitations in such an environment. For demonstration or development purposes we often create VM images with less than a gigabyte of RAM and 5 gigabytes of disk. While fully functional, these virtual machines would only be suitable for a single user doing development or testing.

This document and the installation and maintenance of a HUBzero system has a target audience of experienced Linux administrators (preferably experienced with Debian GNU/Linux).

This is optional

You'll find most of the source code within the web root of a working hub. But you can get source code for the middleware and all other parts of HUBzero by retrieving the source code packages using the debian package manager. To do so, first, update your package mechanism to pull packages from our HUBzero repository (codename 'manny' for this release). Edit your /etc/apt/sources.list and add the following line::

deb-src http://packages.hubzero.org/deb shira main contrib non-free

Then, install the hubzero archive key so that your system can verify packages from the hubzero archive. Run the following command as root:

wget http://packages.hubzero.org/deb/hubzero-signing-key.asc -q -O - | apt-key add -

Once the public key for http://packages.hubzero.org has been installed, you can request the hubzero source code for each package:

apt-get source packageName

where packageName is the desired package from the table below.

The following packages (subject to change): are available from the HUBzero repository for this release. Not all are necessarily used for any given installation.