Required software
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Contents
What Additional Software does EPrints Require?
In brief, EPrints minimally requires Apache (with mod_perl), MySQL and Perl with some extra modules. Various utilities like wget, tar and unzip would also be useful.
EPrints bundles some Perl modules which it uses, to save you installing them.
Where to get the Required Software
Apache, MySQL, Perl and mod_perl are all provided as operating system level packages that can be installed on EPrints' Recommended Platforms. If you wish to install on a platform that is not recommended, then you will need to determine the best way to install these applications. It may be possible to infer comparable packages for your platform by checking the dependencies installed on Red Hat based and Debian based Linux.
Other Tools
File uploads
wget, tar, gunzip and unzip are required to allow users to upload files as .tar.gz or .zip or to capture them from a URL.
These all come installed with most modern versions of linux. If you cannot get them working, you can remove the relevant option by editing "archive_formats" in SystemSettings.pm
If there are problems you may need to tweak how these are invoked in SystemSettings.pm.
Full Text Indexing
The EPrints indexer requires various tools to extract plain (UTF-8) text from different types of document for indexing.
The full text indexer requires various tools to index each kind of document. These tools may or may not be already installed in your system. EPrints uses these tools to build a "words" file for each document (which contains the text of the document in UTF-8). If it can't run the tool, the "words" file will be empty and EPrints will not retry creating it unless you manually remove it.
Full text indexing PDF documents requires pdftotext application provided by the poppler-utils Deb or RPM package.
Microsoft Word
Full text indexing of Microsoft Word documents is provided by the antiword Deb or RPM package. The RPM package is available through the forensics RPM repository.
HTML
Full test indexing of HTML documents requires the lynx text-based browser provided by the lynx Deb or RPM package.
LaTeX Tools
There is an optional feature which allows you to instruct EPrints to look in certain fields (e.g. title and abstract) for strings that look like LaTeX equations and render them as images. These tools are only required if you want to use this feature.
These are provided by the tetex-latex and ImageMagick RPMs or the texlive-base, texlive-bin and imagemagick Deb packages.
This is a "cosmetic" feature, it only affects the rendering of information, so you can always add it later if you want to save time initially.
Other Platforms
Often the best way to find certain packages of other platforms is to use a search engine to look for the package name for Red Hat or Ubuntu Linux along with the name of your platform. (E.g. antiword Arch Linux). If you platform does not have comparable packages, then the next best option is to download the software tool is the official site. Below are links to the download pages for the essential components of EPrints:
