Installing Alexandria

Alexandria is written in Ruby with a GTK+3/GNOME user-interface. It currently only runs on UNIX-style systems, such as GNU/Linux.

Alexandria is not an easy project to build from scratch. Apart from Ruby and GNOME, it has a lot of dependencies. Once the dependencies have been installed, however, building and installing Alexandria is relatively straightforward.

Dependencies

The Ruby-GNOME2 user-interface involves a number of packages:

  • gtk3
  • gio2
  • gstreamer

You should have GTK+ 3, and use Ruby-GNOME2 ~> 3.1.0.

ruby-gettext is required for the internationalisation of the user interface. Requires version ~> 3.1.

Nokogiri

Alexandria uses nokogiri to parse the HTML from web pages for web-based providers.

HTMLEntities

This is used by all website-based providers. htmlentities is used to provide more flexible HTML parsing.

Build Dependencies

Ruby Dependencies

rake is required to build Alexandria from the project Rakefile.

You also need rubygems and rspec to run the RSpec test suite.

Native Dependencies

The gettext package is needed to generate the binary mo files used by ruby-gettext at runtime. You also need the intltool package to merge translations into generated files (and to extract translatable string from xml files during development).

Note that these files are pre-generated in tar.gz releases, so you'll only need them if you're building from the Git version, or want to change the translations.

For support of the Z38.50 protocol you will need the yaz package.

Alexandria also uses the outdate gconf2 configuration storage system, so you'll need to install gconf2.

On Debian/Ubuntu systems, you can install the needed dependencies by running

apt-get install gettext intltool libyaz-dev gconf2

Ruby/ZOOM and Yaz

For Z39.50 support and the Library of Congress and British Library book providers you will need ruby-zoom, which in turn requires the non-Ruby package yaz (see Native Dependencies above).

Note that if you install the recent Ruby/ZOOM as the zoom gem, you will also need to install the marc gem. (Older implementations of ruby-zoom contained their own implementation of MARC.)

The Z39.50 Object-Orientation Model (ZOOM) is an international standard for communication between computer systems, particularly libraries and information-related systems.

image_size

You will need image_size for optimizing the cover images in exported libraries.

Installing Alexandria

After installing all the non-Ruby dependencies, you should be able to install alexandria using

gem install alexandria-book-collection-manager

Installing from Source

These instructions are outdated and you should for now install alexandria as a gem

To build Alexandria from a git checkout, go to the base project directory (where the Rakefile and this INSTALL file are located) and issue the command

rake build

If you have downloaded a source package, this step will not usually be necessary.

You must have root priveledges to install, so use su su -c 'rake install' or sudo sudo rake install

Now you can check the version of the installed Alexandria alexandria --version

To launch Alexandria, simply use alexandria

If you wish to see more output on the console, you can use alexandria --debug

Staged installation for making packages

When building a binary package (such as a deb or rpm) you will want to "install" Alexandria into a specified directory instead of the root filesystem. You should specify this as the DESTDIR environment variable and use the install_package_staging task instead of install

DESTDIR=debian/alexandria rake install_package_staging

If your distribution uses a specific directory to install Ruby packages, you should also set the RUBYLIBDIR.

Installing in the home directory

If you want to install Alexandria in your home directory, you should specify the PREFIX, SHARE and RUBYLIBDIR envrionment variables, and use the install_package task instead of install.

PREFIX=$HOME SHARE=$HOME/.share RUBYLIBDIR=$HOME/.rubylib rake install_package

This will install the alexandria program into $HOME/bin (which you should add to your PATH), and the ruby files to your $HOME/.rubylib which you should add to your RUBYLIBDIR environment variable.

Uninstalling

To uninstall, simply run

sudo rake uninstall

(or rake uninstall_package if you installed in your home directory).

If you specified any of the environment variables PREFIX, SHARE, RUBYLIBDIR and DESTDIR during the installation, you should use the same variables during uninstallation (or rake won't know where to look for the files it has to remove).