OTRS can be installed on many operating systems. OTRS runs not only on linux and on other unix derivates (e.g. OpenBSD or FreeBSD) but on all Microsoft Windows platforms too. OTRS has no excessive hardware requirements. We recommend using a machine with at least a 2 GHz Xeon or comparable CPU, 2 GB RAM and a 160 GB hard drive.
If you want to use OTRS, you need some other software components. The basic software requirements are a web and a database server as well as a working perl environment with some additional modules. The web server and perl has to be installed on the same machine as OTRS. The database back-end can be installed on the local or on an other host.
For the web server, we recommend using apache 1.3.x or apache 2.x. With this web server, you can use the mod_perl module which improves greatly the performance of OTRS. If you can't use apache, OTRS should run on any web server that can execute perl scripts.
For database back-ends, we recommend to use MySQL (3.1.x or higher) or PostgreSQL. However, all database servers that use SQL for their database language should be able to work with OTRS. If you use MySQL you have the advantage that you can configure your database and some system settings during the installation through a web front-end.
For perl, we recommend using at least version 5.8. You need some additional modules which can be installed either with the perl shell and CPAN or via the package manager of your operating system (rpm, yast, apt-get).
The section on the manual installation of perl modules needed describes in more detail how you can set up the perl modules that you need for OTRS.
If you install a binary package of OTRS, which was built for your operating system (rpm, Windows-Installer), either the package contains all perl modules needed or the package manager of your system should take care of the dependences of the perl modules needed.