Cochrane RevMan is a bit of software from Cochrane. It acts as version control system, word processor and data analysis tool for authors of Cochrane systematic reviews. It can also be used for non Cochrane reviews. It can be a little fiddly to get working on Linux. These are my notes on this. I’m using Ubuntu based systems.

Download

Open up a command line terminal and download the installer. Modify the permissions to allow it to execute.

wget http://community.cochrane.org/sites/default/files/uploads/inline-files/revman-downloads/RevMan_5_3_unix.sh
chmod +x RevMan_5_3_unix.sh

# Unless you have an old version of Java installed the next command will fail
./RevMan_5_3_unix.sh

The right version of Java

The installer exits with an error asking for an obsolete version of the Java Virtual Machine - “The version of the JVM must be at least 1.6 and at most 1.7”. Installing the default version of java with sudo apt-get install default-jdk gives too modern a version. It used to be possible to install older versions from a ppa but this seems to no longer work.

# This sequence of commands no longer works
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-jdk7-installer

Download directly from the Oracle archive. This requires you to accept a licence agreement and register with the site. I chose jre-7u80-linux-x64.tar.gz. Once this has downloaded, open a terminal and go to the directory the file downloaded into. Unpack the java runtime environment and move it into the right place.

tar -xzf jre-7u80-linux-x64.tar.gz
sudo mv jre1.7.0_80/ /usr/lib/jvm/jre1.7.0_80
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/lib/jvm/jre1.7.0_80/bin/java 1
sudo update-alternatives --config java

The final command of the above block (sudo update-alternatives --config java) checks to see that the older version of Java has installed. If you have a more recent version of Java, this will also be displayed and will hopefully be the currently selected version. You do not need to change this - press enter to exit the programme.

The RevMan installer should now run successfully. Make sure you are back in the correct directory if you changed directories for the Java download.

# This should now work
./RevMan_5_3_unix.sh

Cleaning up afterwards

Remove all the temporary files

rm RevMan_5_3_unix.sh
rm jre-7u80-linux-x64.tar.gz

Phew. This should all become redundant in the near future if RevMan moves over to a web app.