INSTALL
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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.
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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:
* 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).
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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.
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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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