Linux Installation Instruction vague for a newbie

[warrior1]

First, I'm not a programmer or IT guy. The shell script (install.sh), I assume, can only be run from UNIX providing you have access to the server. I'm using a shared server, so I cannot run this script to set permissions. It would be nice if there were another script, from PHP that could be run that would do the same thing through the browser. Setting permission levels is unclear to me. Do you mean 777,775 or 644?

The section (manual) that says "install some system plugins (if required) sounds, again, as if the user had access to UNIX commands, which I don't. So how do I install "libimage-exiftool-perl" if I'm in a shared server world and I want to search images?

I always get confused (easy to do, I'm a black and white guy when it comes to reading instructions) when I see "eg /var/www/zoom/zoomindexer" Does this path mean "http://domain.com/zoom/zoomindexer" or does it mean /www.domain.com/zoom/zoomindexer"? Writers should show examples for us dummy's because it's unclear trying to interpret what the author is indicating. If I wrote code all the time it would be simple.

[Tim (Wrensoft)]

The image indexing plugin (exiftool) is now included in the latest download so we'll be updating the installation instructions to reflect this.

The current permissions changes done by the install.sh script are blanket coverage to ensure the files can be read by the indexer executable when it is launched and the web server so they are not particular secure but will work in more situations. The numeric equivalents of the changes made in install.sh would be;
a+r = 444
a+rx = 555
a+rw = 666
a+rwx = 777

The paths in the config files are absolute paths on the file system, the indexer runs as an executable so http paths will have no meaning to it.

If you're using shared hosting and don't have access to the Linux command line then you are probably better off creating your index locally using the Windows or Mac version of Zoom. If you have already purchased a Linux license and would like to use one of the other versions please contact us and we will swap your license.

Note that the majority of people who are on shared Linux hosting are going to be better off using the Windows or Mac release. In this case you make the set of index files on your desktop, then just upload the resulting set of index files to the shared Linux host (from your Windows/Mac desktop).

The problem with shared hosting is that you are often, depending on the hosting company, very restricted as to what software you can install, how much RAM you can use, and what file permissions you can set.

[warrior1]

Thanks for the suggestion. I sent a email to "Sales" asking if I can swap over to the WINDOWS version. I tried setting all the permissons, but can't seem to find the right absolute path name to the zoom_defines.php file. Everything sends me to a 404 page.....We'll see what "sales" says. Thanks