Last week I blogged about the ever growing popularity of CEGMA and also the problems of maintaining this difficult-to-install piece of software. In response to that post, people helpfully pointed out that you can more easily install/run CEGMA by using package managers such as Homebrew and/or even run CEGMA on a dedicated Amazon Machine Instance.

These responses led me to update the CEGMA FAQ to list all of the alternative methods of getting CEGMA to run (including running it as an iPlant application). I’m happy that I can today announce a new addition to this list: CEGMA is now available through virtualization:

Korflab CEGMA VM Information

Our CEGMA VM runs the Ubuntu operating system and is pre-configured to have everything installed that CEGMA needs. I’ve tested the VM using the free VirtualBox software and it seems to work just fine [1].

This also means that I will no longer be offering a service to run CEGMA on behalf of others. I had previously offered to run CEGMA for people who had trouble installing the software (or more commonly, the pieces of software that CEGMA requires). I’ve run CEGMA over 100 times for others and this has been a bit of a drain on my time to say the least. Hopefully, our CEGMA VM is a viable alternative. Many thanks are due to Richard Feltstykket at the UC Davis Genome Center’s Bioinformatics Core for setting this up.

Words that will come back to haunt me I expect! ↩