# Recoll user manual
Building from source

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### Prerequisites

If you can install any or all of the following through the package manager for your system, all the better. Especially Qt is a very big piece of software, but you will most probably be able to find a binary package.

You may have to compile Xapian but this is easy.

The shopping list:

- The `autoconf`, `automake` and `libtool` triad. Only `autoconf` is needed up to Recoll 1.21.

- C++ compiler. Up to Recoll version 1.13.04, its absence can manifest itself by strange messages about a missing iconv_open.

- bison command (for Recoll 1.21 and later).

- xsltproc command. For building the documentation (for Recoll 1.21 and later). This sometimes comes with the `libxslt` package. And also the Docbook XML and style sheet files.

- Development files for Xapian core.

  ### Important

  If you are building Xapian for an older CPU (before Pentium 4 or Athlon 64), you need to add the `--disable-sse` flag to the configure command. Else all Xapian application will crash with an `illegal instruction` error.

- Development files for Qt 4 . Recoll has not been tested with Qt 5 yet. Recoll 1.15.9 was the last version to support Qt 3. If you do not want to install or build the Qt Webkit module, Recoll has a configuration option to disable its use (see further).

- Development files for X11 and zlib.

- Development files for Python (or use `--disable-python-module`).

- You may also need libiconv. On Linux systems, the iconv interface is part of libc and you should not need to do anything special.

Check the Recoll download page for up to date version information.

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