The most convenient way to install the files on your system is to use the autotools-based installation. To this end, run the following commands in the directory which contains the refdb-mode sources:

	root# ./configure
      

You should check the output of this command carefully. You'll get a warning if the required RefDB tools are not found, and if sudo is missing. You'll be able to proceed with the installation anyway, but in the first case you won't be able to do anything, in the second case you won't be able to use a part of the administrative interface. The script also tries to find applications that you can use as external viewers for PDF, Postscript, and RTF files. If the script can't find an application which you know is installed, you may have to include this app into your path before running configure, e.g. like this:

	root# export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/OpenOffice.org1.1.4/program
	root# ./configure
      

The applications are used as system-wide defaults for the document viewers. However, each user can individually customize refdb-mode after the installation if she wants to use different applications for this purpose.

Once this is done, you can byte-compile the Emacs Lisp files and install all required files:

	root# make
	root# make install
      

The Lisp files proper will be installed into an appropriate site-lisp directory. The configuration file refdb-mode-config.el will be installed in your system configuration directory, which is either /etc or /usr/local/etc on most systems. The HTML and PDF versions of the documentation will be installed in your documentation directory, usually /usr/share/doc/refdb-elisp or /usr/local/share/doc/refdb-elisp. An info version of the manual is also installed. You can view it from the command line using info refdb-mode or from within Emacs with the RefDB → Show Manual menu command.

If you run more than one Emacs version, or if you want to test-drive refdb-mode without installing it system-wide, you can pass an alternative site-lisp directory to configure with the --with-lispdir option. Make sure that this directory is in your load path, e.g. by adding the following line to your .emacs:

      (add-to-list 'load-path "c:/path/to/elisp/")