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 5.6 or later (5.6.0, 5.6.1 and 5.8 work).

  • 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, there are additional requirements as follows:

  • 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. This XSLT C library can be used standalone and does not need the Gnome desktop environment to operate.

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

    When Lire™ calls xsltproc, you'll likely see something like “Attempt to load network entity http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd” in the Lire debug messages. This message is given by xsltproc, and is somewhat misleading. A more correct message would be: “A network URL should have been loaded but wasn't because you used xsltproc's --nonet option.Lire™ uses --nonet by default so that Lire™ doesn't hang behind firewalls. So: don't be scared by this message.

There are currently two methods to render charts: GD::Graph and ploticus. The GD::Graph is a bit limited, but it's easy if you already have it installed. The ploticus program however, can generate much better looking graphs, especially in combination with PNG, PostScript and PDF output. As a standalone program it may be easier to install (but that also depends on the operating system you use).

The requirements to generate charts with GD::Graph are as follows:

The requirements to generate charts with ploticus are:

  • The ploticus program, available from http://ploticus.sourceforge.net/). This package contains everything necessary to render GIF, SVG and PostScript images.

    For additional output options, see below. The PNG format is recommended especially for web pages.

  • To generate PNG (Portable Network Graphics) you will need the libpng and zlib libraries.

    The libpng library is available from http://www.libpng.org/ and http://www.gzip.org/zlib respectively.

  • To generate JPEG images, you will also need the libgd and libjpeg libraries.

    The GD Graphics Library™ is available from http://www.boutell.com/gd/.

    The JPEG Library™ is available from http://www.ijg.org.

  • To generate PDF vector image files (for embedding in PDF documents) and high quality PNG images, you will also need the GhostScript™ PostScript interpreter.

    The GhostScript™ PostScript interpreter is available from http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/.

To generate HTML or XHTML reports, there are in addition to the XSLT processor, the following requirements:

To generate PDF and RTF reports, there are the following additional requirements:

Other Optional Requirements

Other optional things you may 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 mirror, http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-module/Time/. If it isn't present in the system, the required files included with Lire™ will be installed.

  • The MIME-Tools perl module (available from any CPAN mirror, http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-module/MIME/.

    This module is necessary to conveniently send reports by email or to operate a responder.

Installing

Installation of Lire™ is pretty straightforward:

  1. Make sure that you have the 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 find all requirements you had installed.

    Note

    As for 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 an 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™ can't find. See Chapter 18, Installation Parameters for the complete list.

  4. Compile the software (if you have XML::Parser installed, this will consist only of 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, Running Lire for information on using Lire™.