Standalone Installation

The most common installation scenario will be where you install Lire on one system to generate daily or weekly reports from cron or by using the command line tools. This setup will install the complete software.

Requirements

Minimum Requirements

To install Lire on a system, you need the following:

  • GNU gzip.

  • perl 5.005_03 or later. (5.00503, 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 works).

  • The XML::Parser perl module. (This one needs the expat library.)

    XML::Parser is available from any CPAN mirror. (http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-module/XML/).

    The expat library is available from http://expat.sourceforge.net/.

    As a convenience for our users, you can download a version of Lire which includes those two libraries. Many systems also have prepackaged versions, you're advised to install those packages when available. (They're both packaged for Debian GNU/Linux, as well as for OpenBSD 2.9., see the Lire FAQ for complete details.)

  • Standard UNIX utilities like sh, ls, grep, bc, cut, head, sort, tar, etc.

Those are the minimal requirements. With those, you will be able to generate ASCII reports only.

Requirements for Other Output Formats

To generate reports in other output formats than ASCII, you will need the following additional requirements:

  • An XSLT processor. Currently the only supported XSLT processor is xsltproc, included with the XSLT C Library for Gnome (libxslt). You need version 1.0.4 or later.

    You can download this library along with the libxml2 library which it required from http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/.

To generate charts, you will need the following requirements:

To generate HTML or XHTML reports, you will need in addition to the XSLT processor, the following requirements:

To generate PDF and RTF reports, you will need the following additional requirements:

Other Optional Requirements

Other optional things you might want to install:

  • When available, the logger utility can be used to send Lire output to syslog.

  • The Time-modules perl module (available from any CPAN mirrors, http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-module/Time/. If it isn't present in the system, the required files are included with Lire and will be installed.

Installing

Installation of Lire is pretty straightforward:

Procedure 2.1.

  1. Make sure that you have the necessary requirements installed.

  2. Extract the source code:

    $ gzip -dc lire-version.tar.gz | tar xf -
    		

  3. Configure the software. You may use the --prefix option to specify where you want to install Lire. By default, it will be installed under /usr/local.

    $ cd lire-version
    $ ./configure [--prefix=path]
    		
    Make sure not to use ~ in the path. This is known to fail.

    It should have found all the requirements you had installed.

    Note

    For the SGML/XML components (DocBook DTD, Norman Walsh's DSSSL and XSL stylesheets), configure should find them if they were installed in ‘standard’ places. (This is somewhere in a sgml tree as specified in the FHS and as you will find on most recent GNU/Linux distributions.) If they aren't found, you may hint configure by specifying their location through the use of environment variables:

    $ DBK_XML_DTD=path_to_docbook_dir/docbookx.dtd \
     DBK_DSSSL_STYLESHEETS=path_to_dbk_dsssl_dir \
     DBK_XSL_STYLESHEETS=path_to_dbk_xsl_dir \
     ./configure [--prefix=path]
    
    		  

    Similarly, you can use other environment variables to hint for other things that Lire doesn't find. See Chapter 14 for the complete list.

  4. Compile the software (if you have XML::Parser installed, this will consist only in generating man pages).

    $ make
    		

  5. You may have to become root if you are installing in a directory where only root has write permissions.

  6. Install Lire.

    # make install
    		

That's it! You have a complete Lire installation and are ready to generate some reports. See Chapter 3 for informations on using Lire. You can also read the section called “Configuring Lire Using lr_config” to learn how to configure Lire.