1.2 Installation

Important: If Org is part of the Emacs distribution or an XEmacs package, please skip this section and go directly to Activation.

If you have downloaded Org from the Web, either as a distribution .zip or .tar file, or as a GIT archive, you must take the following steps to install it: Go into the unpacked Org distribution directory and edit the top section of the file Makefile. You must set the name of the Emacs binary (likely either emacs or xemacs), and the paths to the directories where local Lisp and Info files are kept. If you don't have access to the system-wide directories, you can simply run Org directly from the distribution directory by adding the lisp subdirectory to the Emacs load path. To do this, add the following line to .emacs:

     (setq load-path (cons "~/path/to/orgdir/lisp" load-path))

If you plan to use code from the contrib subdirectory, do a similar step for this directory:

     (setq load-path (cons "~/path/to/orgdir/contrib/lisp" load-path))

XEmacs users now need to install the file noutline.el from the xemacs sub-directory of the Org distribution. Use the command:

     make install-noutline

Now byte-compile the Lisp files with the shell command:

     make

If you are running Org from the distribution directory, this is all. If you want to install into the system directories, use

     make install
     make install-info

Then add to .emacs:

     ;; This line only if Org is not part of the X/Emacs distribution.
     (require 'org-install)