Open Source Projects Europe

                        Chapter 4. Installation

4.1. Building from source

  4.1.1. Prerequisites

   At the very least, you will need to download and install the

   xapian core package (Recoll currently uses version 0.9.2), and the

   qt runtime and development packages (Recoll development currently

   uses version 3.3.5, but any 3.3 version is probably ok).

   You will most probably be able to find a binary package for qt for

   your system. You may have to compile Xapian but this is not

   difficult (if you are using FreeBSD, there is a port).

   You may also need libiconv. Recoll currently uses version 1.9

   (this should not be critical). On Linux systems, the iconv

   interface is part of libc and you should not need to do anything

   special.

   you wish to have indexed (these are run-time dependencies. None is

   needed for building Recoll):

       filenames will be indexed.

   internally.

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  4.1.2. Building

   Recoll has been built on Linux (redhat7.3, mandriva 2005, Fedora

   Core 3), FreeBSD and Solaris 8. If you build on another system, I

   would very much welcome patches.

   Depending on the qt configuration on your system, you may have to

   set the QTDIR and QMAKESPECS variables in your environment:

   mkspecs/.

   will occur during compilation if the environment is not set up.

   Also, for 1.1.0 the qmake command should be in your PATH (later

   releases can also find it in $QTDIR/bin).

   mk/sysconf. If your system is not known yet, it will tell you as

   much, and you may want to manually copy and modify one of the

   existing files (the new file name should be the output of uname

   -s).

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  4.1.3. Installation

   and the sample configuration files, scripts and other shared data

   to prefix/share/recoll.

4.2. Installing a prebuilt copy

  4.2.1. Installing through a package system

   If you are lucky enough to be using a port system or a prebuilt

   package (RPM or other), just follow the usual procedure, and have

   a look at the configuration section.

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  4.2.2. Installing a prebuilt Recoll

   The unpackaged binary versions are just compressed tar files of a

   build tree, where only the useful parts were kept (executables and

   sample configuration).

   The executable binary files are built with a static link to

   libxapian and libiconv, to make installation easier (no

   dependencies). However, this also means that you cannot change the

   versions which are used.

   After extracting the tar file, you can proceed with installation

   as if you had built the package from source.

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4.3. Configuration overview

   There are two sets of configuration files. The system-wide files

   are kept in a directory named like

   /usr/[local/]share/recoll/examples, they define default values for

   the system. A parallel set of files exists in the .recoll

   directory in your home (this can be changed with the

   RECOLL_CONFDIR environment variable. The database is also kept in

   .recoll by default, (this can be changed by a configuration

   parameter).

   If the .recoll directory does not exist when recoll or recollindex

   are started, it will be created with a set of empty configuration

   files. recoll will give you a chance to edit the configuration

   file before starting indexation. recollindex will proceed

   immediately.

   Most of the parameters specific to the recoll GUI are set through

   the Preferences menu and stored in the standard QT place

   ($HOME/.qt/recollrc). You probably do not want to edit this by

   hand.

   For other options, Recoll uses text configuration files. You will

   have to edit them by hand for now (there is still some hope for a

   GUI configuration tool in the future). The most accurate

   documentation for the configuration parameters is given by

   comments inside the default files, and we will just give a general

   overview here.

   All configuration files share the same format. For exemple, a

   short extract of the main configuration file might look as

   follows:

         # Space-separated list of directories to index.

         topdirs =  ~/docs /usr/share/doc

         [~/somedirectory-with-utf8-txt-files]

         defaultcharset = utf-8

   There are three kinds of lines:

     * Comment (starts with #) or empty.

     * Parameter affectation (name = value).

     * Section definition ([somedirname]).

   Section lines allow redefining some parameters for a directory

   subtree. Some of the parameters used for indexation are looked up

   hierarchically from the more to the less specific. Not all

   parameters can be meaningfully redefined, this is specified for

   each in the next section.

   The tilde character (~) is expanded in file names to the name of

   the user's home directory.

   White space is used for separation inside lists. Elements with

   embedded spaces can be quoted using double-quotes.

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  4.3.1. Main configuration file

   recoll.conf is the main configuration file. It defines things like

   what to index (top directories and things to ignore), and the

   default character set to use for document types which do not

   specify it internally.

   The default configuration will index your home directory. If this

   is not appropriate, use recoll to copy the sample configuration,

   click Cancel, and edit the configuration file before restarting

   the command. This will start the initial indexation, which may

   take some time.

   Paramers:

   topdirs

           Specifies the list of directories to index (recursively).

   skippedNames

           A space-separated list of patterns for names of files or

           directories that should be completely ignored. The list

           defined in the default file is:

 *~ #* bin CVS  Cache caughtspam  tmp

           The list can be redefined for subdirectories, but is only

           actually changed for the top level ones in topdirs.

           The top-level directories are not affected by this list

           (that is, a directory in topdirs might match and would

           still be indexed).

           The list in the default configuration does not exclude

           hidden directories (names beginning with a dot), which

           means that it may index quite a few things that you do not

           want. On the other hand, mail user agents like thunderbird

           usually store messages in hidden directories, and you

           probably want this indexed. One possible solution is to

           have .* in skippedNames, and add things like

           ~/.thunderbird or ~/.evolution in topdirs.

   loglevel

           Verbosity level for recoll and recollindex. A value of 4

           lists quite a lot of debug/information messages. 2 only

           lists errors.

   logfilename

           Where should the messages go. 'stderr' can be used as a

           special value.

   filtersdir

           A directory to search for the external filter scripts used

           to index some types of files. The value should not be

           changed, except if you want to modify one of the default

           scripts. The value can be redefined for any subdirectory.

   indexstemminglanguages

           A list of languages for which the stem expansion databases

           will be built. See recollindex(1) for possible values. You

           can add a stem expansion database for a different language

           by using recollindex -s, but it will be deleted during the

           next indexation. Only languages listed in the

           configuration file are permanent.

   iconsdir

           The name of the directory where recoll result list icons

           are stored. You can change this if you want different

           images.

   dbdir

           The name of the Xapian database directory. It will be

           created if needed when the database is initialized.

   defaultcharset

           The name of the character set used for files that do not

           contain a character set definition (ie: plain text files).

           This can be redefined for any subdirectory. If it is not

           set at all, the character set used is the one defined by

           the nls environment (LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LANG), or iso8859-1

           if nothing is set.

   guesscharset

           Decide if we try to guess the character set of files if no

           internal value is available (ie: for plain text files).

           This does not work well in general, and should probably

           not be used.

   usesystemfilecommand

           Decide if we use the file -i system command as a final

           step for determining the mime type for a file (the main

           procedure uses suffix associations as defined in the

           mimemap file). This can be useful for files with

           suffixless names, but it will also cause the indexation of

           many bogus "text" files.

   indexallfilenames

           Recoll indexes file names in a special section of the

           database to allow specific file names searches using wild

           cards. This parameter decides if file name indexing is

           performed only for files with mime types that would

           qualify them for full text indexation, or for all files

           inside the selected subtrees, independant of mime type.

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  4.3.2. The mimemap file

   mimemap specifies the file name extension to mime type mappings.

   For file names without an extension, or with an unknown one, the

   system's file -i command will be executed to determine the mime

   type (this can be switched off inside the main configuration

   file).

   mimemap also has a list of extensions which should be ignored

   totally (to avoid losing time by executing file for things that

   certainly should not be indexed).

   The mappings can be specified on a per-subtree basis, which may be

   useful in some cases. Example: gaim logs have a .txt extension but

   should be handled specially, which is possible because they are

   usually all located in one place.

   mimemap also has a recoll_noindex variable which is a list of

   suffixes. Matching files will be skipped (avoids unnecessary

   decompressions or file executions). This is partially redundant

   with skippedNames in the main configuration file, with two

   differences: it will not affect directories, and it can be changed

   for any subdirectory.

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  4.3.3. The mimeconf file

   mimeconf specifies how the different mime types are handled for

   indexation, and for display.

   Changing the indexation parameters is probably not a good idea

   except if you are a Recoll developper.

   You may want to adjust the external viewers defined in (ie: html

   is either previewed internally or displayed using firefox, but you

   may prefer mozilla, your openoffice.org program might be named

   oofice instead of openoffice ...). Look for the [view] section.

   You can also change the icons which are displayed by recoll in the

   result lists (the values are the basenames of the png images

   inside the iconsdir directory (specified in recoll.conf).

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