[Xapian-discuss] How to use Linux commands for Omega

Olly Betts olly at survex.com
Mon Apr 24 16:14:12 BST 2006


On Mon, Apr 24, 2006 at 09:55:17AM -0400, Jim Lynch wrote:
> In any case, I'm fairly sure you don't have root access on that system 
> unless it is a dedicated system.  Unfortunately I don't know of any way 
> to use xapian on a hosted service like GoDaddy unless they already have 
> xapian/omega installed.  I have 6 sites hosted at various hosting 
> companies and not a single one of them has xapian available.  Only two 
> of them allow shell access but the compilers are not available so I 
> couldn't even generate the libraries myself. 

Some hosting companies supply compilers, but as you say many don't.

You could just try asking politely if they could install Xapian and
Omega.  If they're regularly requested, you might be in luck.

> I suppose I could cross compile on a local system, but that's not 
> something I would want to do.  I suppose you could build a static binary 
> of omega on a local Linux system and put it on your web site, but I have 
> never tried anything like that.

If you have the same Linux distro and architecture, there's no need
to cross-compile.

And you can build dynamically and just copy over the dynamic librariesi
to.  Provided you configure them for the location you're actually going
to install them to they should work as libtool sets the runpath.  Or you
could override with LD_LIBRARY_PATH but you might as well get it right
to start with if you're going to the effort of building them.

If it's one of the distros that there are Xapian packages for, you can
probably just unpack the package by hand and use the binaries from that
(though you will need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in this case).

But to be frank, if you're not at all familiar with Unix, trying to
install compiled software on a machine without a compiler and without
root access is not a good place to try to start learning.  In that case,
I'd suggest you look at what's already installed - there's probably some
sort of search facility available.  It might not be as fast or scale as
well as Xapian, but if you've a vast number of documents, I doubt you'd
be hosting it on a shell account on a shared machine...

Cheers,
    Olly



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