Required software

What Additional Software does EPrints Require?

In brief, EPrints requires Apache (with mod_perl), MySQL and Perl with some extra modules. Ideally you also want wget, tar and unzip.

EPrints bundles some perl modules which it uses, to save you installing them.

Where to get the Required Software

It's up to you. We have had best results with installing MySQL from RPM and apache from source.

The best place to get a software tool is the official site, but we've put a mirror of versions known to work at: http://www.eprints.org/files/tools/ - you don't need to install everything in the tools directory - just those described below.

• Installing MySQL
• Installing mod_perl
• Installing Perl modules
• Installing GDOME (optional but recommended)

Other Tools

File uploads

wget, tar, gunzip and unzip are required to allow users to upload files as .tar.gz or .zip or to captures them from a URL.

These all come installed with most modern versions of linux. If you can get them working, you can remove the option by edditing "archive_formats" in SystemSettings.pm

Tested with wget 1.6.

If there are problems you may need to tweak how these are invoked in SystemSettings.pm

Full Text 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.

PDF 

To index pdfs you need "pdftotext" which is part of the "xpdf" package. RPM's are available.

ASCII 

To index ASCII files you don't need anything. That's easy.

Microsoft Word 

To index MS Word files you need a package called "wvware". It can be a bit of a bit of a pain to install.

HTML 

To index HTML files you need a tool called "lynx". It's a text-based web-browser.

Latex Tools

There is an optional feature which allows you to set eprints to look in certain fields (eg. title and abstract) for stuff which looks like latex equations and display it as an image of that equation instead. These tools are only required if you want to use this feature.

latex, dvips and convert (convert is part of "imagemagick"). (These all ship with Red Hat's GNU/Linux distribution but you may have to install them yourself on other systems.)

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.