Install MGX

Obtaining MGX

We regularly publish new releases of the MGX client application, which are available for download at MGX Release.

The MGX application is provided as a platform-independent .zip archive.

An installation isn’t necessary, just unzip the file and start the software from the bin/ subdirectory (Linux: mgx_gui; Windows: mgx_gui64.exe). Please check whether an updated version is available before reporting bugs.

If you are a previous user of MGX 1.0, make sure to download the latest MGX-(date).zip file; for MGX 2.0, all releases are prefixed with MGX2 followed by a timestamp.

Prerequisites

MGX is a client/server application based on the Netbeans Platform and implemented in Java. To run the MGX 2.0 client application, the following dependencies have to be met:

• Java Development Kit 17 or later
• Supported Operating Systems: Windows, Linux, macOS
• Memory requirements: >= 4GB RAM
• (preferably broadband) Internet connection

Details

Java

MGX requires a working Java Development Kit (JDK) to be installed on the computer. Typically, Java is already installed on most systems or can be obtained free of charge from OpenJDK Java.

You can check the version of the currently installed Java version with java -version on the command line.

JDK 17 or later is required.

Supported Operating Systems

The MGX application is developed and regularly used on Unix-based systems, e.g. Linux, but is also compatible with computers running Windows or macOS.

Memory and disk requirements

4 GB of available main memory are sufficient to run MGX. Installation of the software requires about 100 MB of disk space.

Internet connection

The network communication protocol used by the MGX framework has been heavily optimized to allow usage even with low-throughput connections. Thus, typical usage of the application like visualization of analysis results does not require a lot of bandwidth, although overall performance may suffer with high-latency or low-bandwidth connections. However, as sequence datasets obtained by metagenome and metatranscriptome sequencing tend to be quite large, a broadband connection is recommended at least for initial data upload to the MGX server or when exporting sequence data from a MGX project.