I'm new to talend and the talendforge community.

I want to evaluate talend open studio by installing it on one of our many LVMs.

I don't see anything in the documentation, which would make me think this isn't possible.

The LVM host systems are Debian GNU/Linux 6 (Squeeze) and resources are not a problem (Dual Quad-Core Processors, 16GB RAM, 4x1.5TB SATA Hard Disks - all parked on a 100Mb x 50Mb ethernet connection with a bank of 16 IPs).

Clients use our cloud for testing purposes, before rolling something new out internally. We consult with these clients about development, integration and etc. We facilitate testing environments with just about anything, from basic LAMP Stacks to Tomcat JDE and so on.

We've recently had a couple clients interested in talend. While it would be new for us, we never discourage our clients from trying anything.

While we provide an extensive application/software base available in our development Cloud, we restrict the available database systems to MySQL databases only. We may add PostgreSQL support in the future, but we only consider Open Source options. We have no plans of offering any Micro$lop (Micro$oft) options at all. Just out of principal, we discourage our clients from using anything by Micro$lop (even offer solutions to help them convert away from Micro$lop, to Linux or Mac). We also do not encourage connections to Micro$lop services (I.E. ODBC and etc).

We want to make Open Source options by talend, available on our LVMs, but I'm having a little issue understanding the published Open Studio installation process (found here: http://talendforge.org/wiki/doku.php?id=doc:installation_guide and here: http://talendforge.org/wiki/doku.php?id=doc:installation_guide_external_software). My specific issue is with the "Installing database client software (bulk)" and "Installing external client software" sections. What are these for and are they required?

Also, I do not see any requirements about how to set up a MySQL database or how to connect Open Studio to a MySQL Database.

Keep in mind, we operate in a nitche market, thriving on Open Source. Our clients data will come from sources such as Sugar CRM, vTiger, OpenEMM, PHPList, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and so on. We want to offer integration of talend to what they currently use. The most recent inquiries came from clients using OpenEMM (another Java/MySQL application).

Any input or advice would be appreciated.