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:

Those are the minimal requirements. With those, you will be able to generate text, html and latex reports.

Requirements for Other Output Formats

Some output formats have other requirements:

  • The method to render charts is through the use of ploticus. The ploticus generates nice looking graphs, especially in combination with HTML, PostScript or PDF output. As a standalone program it is quite easy to install (depending on the operating system you use).

    The ploticus program is available from http://ploticus.sourceforge.net/). This package contains everything necessary to render GIF, SVG and PostScript images. The site offers binaries for various platforms.

  • To generate DVI or PostScript reports you will need a recent TeX installation which contains Omega (lambda and odvips). The popular teTeX™ distribution ships Omega since version 0.9.

    The teTeX™ distribution is available from http://www.tug.org/teTeX/.

  • To generate PDF reports, in addition to a recent TeX installation, you will need the command ps2pdf which comes with the GhostScript™ PostScript interpreter.

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

  • To generate Excel95 reports you will need the Spreadsheet::WriteExcel perl module, available from http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-module/Spreadsheet/ (which in turn requires Parse::RecDescent from http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-module/Parse/).

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.

  4. Compile the software, 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.