Enough talking, let's get on to some real action. The first step is to install Sphinx itself.
Sphinx was developed and tested mostly on UNIX based systems. All modern UNIX based operating systems with an ANSI compliant compiler should be able to compile and run Sphinx without any issues. However, Sphinx has also been found running on the following operating systems without any issues.
Linux (Kernel 2.4.x and 2.6.x of various distributions)
Microsoft Windows 2000 and XP
FreeBSD 4.x, 5.x, 6.x
NetBSD 1.6, 3.0
Solaris 9, 11
Mac OS X
Note: The Windows version of Sphinx is not meant to be used on production servers. It should only be used for testing and debugging. This is the primary reason that all examples given in this book will be for Linux-based systems.
If you intend to install Sphinx on a UNIX based system, then you need to check the following:
C++ compiler (GNU GCC works fine)
A make program (GNU make works fine)
The XML libraries libexpat1 (name may be different on non Ubuntu distro) and libexpat1-dev (If you intend to use the xmlpipe2 data source)