Installation - Linux Generic

Until we provide a deb package please use this page for reference when installing OSS on a Debian-based system (Ubuntu, Xandros, ...).

The Short Version below should be sufficient ; if not use the More Detailed Version.

Contents 1 Short version 2 More Detailed version 2.1 Checking your Java version 2.1.1 Installing Java 2.2 Downloading OSS 2.3 Running it 3 Troubleshooting 3.1 Checking whether your 8080 port is free

Short version

1. Make sure you have a Java 5 Virtual Machine or newer correctly installed
2. Download the latest stable build (tar.gz) [1]
3. Deflate it and run start.sh, which you'll find within the OSS folder
4. Open your favorite browser with the url http://<yourserver>:8080 (localhost if it's running on your own machine)
5. Enjoy discovering OSS

In order to hasten the process, apt-get will be used in future versions.

More Detailed version

The following covers the same steps as above, in more detail.

Checking your Java version

1. In a shell, enter the command line

   java -version

Check whether your Java version is 5 or newer

1. If your version is not Version 5 or greater you'll need to update your Java engine
2. If you don't have Java, install it (see below)

Installing Java

Our Open Source-friendly recommendation is that you install the latest OpenJDK (1.6.0 as of this writing).

To install OpenJDK just follow the instructions provided at the openJDK site.

Downloading OSS

We recommend that you always get the latest version of OSS on SourceForge.

Please download the tar.gz package for Linux/BSD, then deflate it as in the example below:

tar -xzvf open-search-server-1.1-r540.tar.gz

When unzipped you'll get a folder called open-search-server. All your OSS binaries (and your future data) will be stored in this folder.

Running it

Just launch the start.sh present in your OSS base folder to get the application running:

cd open-search-server
./start.sh

To access your OSS Back Office, open you browser (Firefox, Opera, Safari, ...) and open the page http://localhost:8080

If everything went right you'll see the OSS interface. If nothing is displaying and you are sure you followed this installation correctly, check the troubleshooting section.

So far, so good ? You can now go to the next step and create your first index

Troubleshooting

Checking whether your 8080 port is free

If by chance you already have a server listening on the 8080 tcp port you'll have to change in the Catalina config files.

To check whether the 8080 port is already occupied use the following command line:

netstat -an | grep :8080

If you have a response resembling the one below, your port isn't free:

TCP    0.0.0.0:8080           0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       676

If port 8080 is already being used, we suggest that you simply use another port for OSS. To do so:

1. Open in you OSS folder the file apache-tomcat-6.0.20/conf/server.xml
2. Locate the line starting with:

   <Connector port="8080" ...

   then change that to

   <Connector port="8081" ...

3. Save your file and start OSS with start.sh.
4. Your OSS Back Office is now available at this address: http://localhost:8081