Downloading and installing Freex

Downloading and installing Freex
Dependencies
Installing Freex itself
Checking everything works
Using Freex with Muse
Troubleshooting

Dependencies

Installing Freex itself shouldn't be too hard. The tricky bit is getting all the dependencies working first. Here's the list:

Emacs
We've been using version 22, but 21 and higher should work. On OSX we recommend Aquamacs, which is also based on version 22 of Emacs.
Python
We've used both 2.4 and 2.5 with no problem.
Pymacs
Freex requires Pymacs to interface with python for all of its database functionality.
Sqlite
We use version 3 to hold the data.
Sqlalchemy
This is the python interface to the database. The stable 0.3 version is working well for us.

Installing the dependencies on Ubuntu

This is very easy (at least on Feisty Fawn):

sudo apt-get install emacs22 python2.5 python-pymacs sqlite3 python-sqlalchemy

Gotta love package management.

Installing the dependencies on OSX

The long and the short of it is that you'll likely have to install all the dependencies from source. Follow the links provided above to download the packages. Each should have current instructions for compiling and installing them.

Installing the dependencies on Microsoft Windows

We haven't tried installing Pymacs on MS Windows, so we can't offer any assistance with that. If you do get Pymacs and Freex working under Windows, we would love to hear from you.

On any other system, you'll have to see if there's some other package or binary you can use, or follow the Pymacs installation instructions.

Installing Freex itself

Download and untar the latest Freex tarball from the downloads directory (which should be called something like 'freex-x.x.x.tar.gz'). Inside, you'll see a file called 'freex-conf-test.el.'. This provides an example configuration file. Make a copy and call it something like 'freex-conf.el' - you can store it with your Freex scripts, or put with your other elisp init files as you prefer.

Go through your new freex-conf.el and modify any references to '/home/greg/elisp/freex' to the location containing your Freex scripts. Also, change the value of the 'freex-mode-dir' variable from '/home/greg/elisp/freex/testdocs/' to wherever you'd like to store the text files containing your hard-won wisdom. It makes sense to keep this 'data' directory separate from the 'scripts' directory. Create your data directory now.

If you want to make sure that Freex mode loads up every time you start Emacs in future, just add these lines to your .emacs file:

(add-to-list 'load-path "/my/freex/scripts/")

(load "freex-conf")

Run M-x eval-buffer on freex-conf.el, and now Freex mode should be ready to go, as soon as it sees its first '.freex' file.

Checking everything works

Now, open up a new file called 'test0.freex' in your freex data directory. If you see 'Freex' added to your mode bar at the bottom of your Emacs window, you're in business. If not, head to the Troubleshooting section.

Now, you're ready to try the intro tutorial.

Using Freex with Muse

As you probably guessed, we are impressed and inspired by the Muse publishing system for Emacs. We are working on making Muse and Freex play well together and we are at least part way there. Far enough that some percentage of Freex users actually run Freex in Muse mode on a daily basis.

The following is how to it up to use Freex in one of your Muse projects (such as your personal wiki.)

Troubleshooting

Under construction still. Sorry - that's not very helpful of us.