[Koha] problems with Zebra on Ubuntu 12.04

[Howell, Lynda]

I have Koha 3.8.1 installed and mostly working on Ubuntu 12.04, and have created/imported a bunch of records to work with.  The problem I'm having is that all searches in the catalog come up with no results.  I can see the records I imported in the reservoir, so I know they're there, but Search the Catalog finds nothing.

There are several related FAQs at http://koha-community.org/documentation/faq/, but I've tried all of the suggestions without any luck.

Here's the command I'm currently using to rebuild the index:

sudo -u koha -H env KOHA_CONF=/etc/koha/koha-conf.xml PERL5LIB=/usr/share/koha/lib /usr/share/koha/bin/migration_tools/rebuild_zebra.pl -b -r -v

The first time I run that, I get a bunch of "[No such file or directory]" error messages about /var/lock/koha/zebradb/biblios -- I've checked, and there really is no /var/lock/koha directory.  If I create those directories (and confirm that the koha user is the owner), I stop seeing error messages.  But I still can't search for records.  And I have to keep recreating this /var/lock/koha directory and subdirectories -- I think they're being deleted when I restart the computer.

I haven't found anywhere that describes what the expected output of rebuild_zebra.pl is.  I've been assuming that no news is good news, but maybe it's not.  For example, I see it  count out dots for all of my records under "exporting biblio", but then it says
	REINDEXING zebra
	==================
	==================
	CLEANING
	==================

Without another list of dots (although it pauses between the two lines of ===s for several seconds as if it's doing something).  Is that what it's supposed to do?

I installed Koha following the instructions at http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Koha_on_Ubuntu.  They were written for Koha 3.06 and Ubuntu 11.10, but everything seemed to work as written with only one exception.  In Step 1 under Install Koha, the second command "make" -- gave me 
	/usr/bin/perl "-Iblib/arch" "-Iblib/lib" fix-perl-path.PL blib
	Permission denied at fix-perl-path.PL line 88.
	make: *** [blib] Error 13
I changed it to "sudo make", and it worked.  And again with the next command -- "make test" didn't work but "sudo make test" did.  I wouldn't expect that to cause problems like this.  

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks for your help.

Lynda Howell.