The EMAN2 Wiki is the main source for EMAN2 documentation and information
SPARX is distributed with EMAN2 in a single binary package. If you install one of the packages below, you will get both EMAN2 and SPARX with a single installation. If you need MPI support for either SPARX or EMAN2, you also need to download that package.
EMAN2 is the successor to EMAN1, and EMAN2.1 eliminated the unpopular BDB system from EMAN2, in favor of flat files. EMAN is a broadly based greyscale scientific image processing suite with a primary focus on processing data from transmission electron microscopes. EMAN's original purpose was performing single particle reconstructions (3-D volumetric models from 2-D cryo-EM images) at the highest possible resolution, but the suite now also offers support for single particle cryo-ET, and tools useful in many other subdisciplines such as helical reconstruction, 2-D crystallography and whole-cell tomography. Image processing in a suite like EMAN differs from consumer image processing packages like Photoshop in that pixels in images are represented as floating-point numbers rather than small (8-16 bit) integers. In addition, image compression is avoided entirely, and there is a focus on quantitative analysis rather than qualitative image display.
Full installation instructions are at:
http://blake.bcm.edu/emanwiki/EMAN2/Install