Home › Theatre Manager Online Help

Getting Started - Hardware Requirements

Wed, 03/04/2009 - 17:29 — AMSAdmin

Theatre Manager is cross platform, you can have both Macintoshs and PCs access Theatre Manager's database on the same Network, without worrying about any data integrity issues. As a general rule, if your computer is less than 2 years old, it will work with Theatre Manager.

There is an example configuration and a friendly reminder ... always do your backups faithfully each day.


Apple Macintosh

  • 2 Gigs of ram
  • 300 MB free disk space for Theatre Manager
  • 1024x 768 resolution (wide screen LCD monitors are fantastic)
  • Macintosh compatible printer and an optional thermal
  • OS 10.5.x or later is required.
  • Any dual core intel mac, 2.0g GHz or better. Due to features in Lion (OSX 10.7) and planned features for Theatre Manager, PowerPC Macs may not be officially supported after Jan 31, 2012 or limited to using 9.12.xx of TM or earlier.


IBM PC and Compatibles

  • Any dual core machine at 2.0 Ghz or better. Some older Pentium Processor running at 3.2+ GHz or better will also work. Celerons should not be used because they have no floating point
  • Vista Pro or Windows 7 Pro. Note that as of July 2011, XP is not recommend as some recent Microsoft windows updates appear interfere with a number of applications - and XP is no longer supported by Microsoft.
  • 2 gigs of ram for Microsoft XP Pro. 3 or 4 gigs for Vista Pro or Windows 7 Pro
  • 300 MB free disk space for Theatre Manager
  • For Vista or Win 7: 1280x800.
    For XP: 1024x 768 resolution
    (wide screen LCD monitors are fantastic)
  • Windows compatible printer and an optional thermal ticket printer
  • Mouse or other Windows pointing device


Database Server

  • Theatre Manager uses Postgres SQL for the database. You can use it on windows, OSX, or Linux
  • we prefer gigabit network setup, but 100T switched Ethernet works fine
  • Recommended specs are:
    • Operating system: Any supported by postgres which includes OSX 10.5 and later (32 and 64 bit), XP, 2003 server (32 and 64 bit), win 7 (32 and 64 bit), 2008 server (32 and 64 bit), most linux distributions, solaris. You do not need to have a 'server' operating system to run postgres.
    • Memory: 4GB minimum, 8GB or more recommended
    • Disk: the faster the disk array, the better. It is the single most import factor in server performance. We recommend multiple disks, striping (raid 0 or 1+0), hardware raid, fast spindles 3GB sata or better -- anything that will make disk I/O fast
    • two processors if possible, quad core if economical


Backups

  • A backup script is provided during database setup that will allow you to create backups at any time (even when theatre manager is running). It is automated and dumps the data to a directory of your choice as well as using FTP (optional) to copy the database to another machine. This is typically configured to save a month of backups. We do recommend using some device (eg USB keys) to save offsite copies.

    Suggestions for a good backup strategy.