Parent: [cc5f23] (diff)

Child: [52130a] (diff)

Download this file

INSTALL    351 lines (246 with data), 13.1 kB

                        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.

   External file types. Recoll uses external applications to index
   some file types. You need to install them for the file types that
   you wish to have indexed (these are run-time dependencies. None is
   needed for building Recoll):

     * PDF: pdftotext is part of the Xpdf package.

     * Postscript: pstotext.

     * MS Word: antiword.

     * RTF: unrtf

     * dvi: dvips

     * djvu: DjVuLibre

     * MP3: Recoll will use the id3info command from the id3lib
       package to extract tag information. Without it, only the
       filenames will be indexed.

   Text, Html, mail folders and Openoffice files are processed
   internally.

     --------------------------------------------------------------

  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:

     * QTDIR should point to the directory above the one that holds
       the qt include files (ie: qt.h).

     * QMAKESPECS should be set to the name of one of the qt mkspecs
       subdirectories (ie: linux-g++).

   On many Linux systems, QTDIR is set by the login scripts, and
   QMAKESPECS is not needed because there is a default link in
   mkspecs/.

   The Recoll configure script does a better job of checking these
   variables after release 1.1.1. Before this, unexplained errors
   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).

   Normal procedure:

         cd recoll-xxx
         configure
         make
         (practises usual hardship-repelling invocations)
      

   There little autoconfiguration. The configure script will mainly
   link one of the system-specific files in the mk directory to
   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).

     --------------------------------------------------------------

  4.1.3. Installation

   Either type make install or execute recollinstall prefix, in the
   root of the source tree. This will copy the commands to prefix/bin
   and the sample configuration files, scripts and other shared data
   to prefix/share/recoll.

   You can then proceed to configuration.

     --------------------------------------------------------------

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.

     --------------------------------------------------------------

  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.

     --------------------------------------------------------------

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.

     --------------------------------------------------------------

  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.

     --------------------------------------------------------------

  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.

     --------------------------------------------------------------

  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).

     --------------------------------------------------------------