First of all you need GNU Emacs itself. Emacs is available prepackaged for most contemporary operating systems, or it can be obtained as a source tarball from the GNU site. You also need a working installation of RefDB. You need at least the clients on the same computer that will run refdb-mode. If you access the application server refdbd on a remote server, you can build the required tools on your computer by configuring RefDB with the --disable-server switch.

The RefDB clients must be fully operational on your computer. If you can't run the RefDB clients manually, refdb-mode won't be able to do it either. This means in particular that your client configuration files (~/.refdbarc, ~/.refdbcrc, and ~/.refdbibrc) must be set up properly, including a valid username/password combo. refdb-mode cannot ask for the password interactively (aside from the fact that this would be annoying), so this must be set in your configuration file. Please refer to the RefDB manual for further instructions

The bibliography data conversion relies on the external bibutils tools.