Annotate relies on a configuration file, annotate.conf, for everything that is supposed to be customized by the administrator. To generate an initial configuration, Annotate is shipped with an interactive Perl script. It will ask you a few questions about the most important things to configure and will create a working configuration. You can decide whether you want to configure Annotate for the authoring station, for the web server or for both.

So the first thing to to is to run the installation script:

perl install.pl

The script will ask for some configuration details one by one. It will show you the default settings in braces. If a default value is reasonable for your environment, you can simply press Enter, otherwise you should enter the desired value. Having answered every question, you can again review your settings and then create a configuration file in your current directory.

Put this file (annotate.conf) into the /usr/local/etc directory. If you cannot put it there, please refer to the section called “The right place for the configuration file” for details.

The new configuration file will only serve as a starting point for your Annotate installation, because it does not make use of every feature that Annotate provides. For a complete list of configuration options, please have a look at Chapter 3, The annotate.conf configuration file.