Moby – Disco Lies

Flax search is a search engine based on the powerful Xapian search engine. Basically it’s Xapian pre-configured with a nice UI and some extra features, and their business model is custom configuration and support, while offering Flax Basic as a taster. At the moment Flax Basic is developed primarily for Windows as a desktop search tool (a’la Google Desktop) but it can also be used as an intranet search engine, and it can be installed on Linux, like so. As root:

apt-get install python-cherrypy3 python-processing html2text
cd /opt
wget http://flaxcode.googlecode.com/files/flax-source-1.0.0.tgz && tar xvf flax-source-1.0.0.tgz
mv flax-source-1.0.0 flax
wget http://flaxcode.googlecode.com/files/HTMLTemplate-1.4.2.tar.gz && tar xvf HTMLTemplate-1.4.2.tar.gz
http://xappy.googlecode.com/files/xappy-0.5.tar.gz && tar xvf xappy-0.5.tar.gz
cd HTMLTemplate-1.4.2/ && python setup.py install
cd ../xappy-0.5 && python setup.py install
cd ../flax/src && python startflax.py --set-admin-password

They recommend starting startflax.py with --conf-dir=. to get it reading conf files held within the same directory, the python scripts seem to look in data/conf/ so simply issue:
mv *.conf data/conf/ (or cp *.conf data/conf/, or cd into data/conf/ and make some symlinks… your choice)

Then finally:
python startflax.py

Browse to http://localhost:8090/admin and login with the username ‘admin’ and the password that you configured, et voila! It’s all yours.

These instructions assume you have all the dependencies and tools necessary, the first apt-get should get you mostly sorted though. YMMV!