Chapter 4. Installation

Table of Contents
4.1. Building from source
4.2. Installing a prebuilt copy
4.3. Configuration overview

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:

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 targetdir, in the root of the source tree. This will copy the commands to $targetdir/bin and the sample configuration files, scripts and other shared data to $targetdir/share/recoll.