[Tracker] Running tracker on an Ubuntu server box?

[tigerf <tigerf web de>]

Hello from Germany,

I'm looking for a way how to use tracker on an Ubuntu 8.10 server
edition (!) to index huge numbers (60.000+) of .doc and .pdf-files.

Is there somewhere a how-to or is the whole idea simply unrealistic?

Background:
I'm currently setting up a LAMP + Samba server to replace a windows box,
which offers thousands of documents to its windows clients via network
shares. I'm using Apache & PHP as a frontend, which translates the
user's web-page input into a commandline using "find". The results are
parsed and returned to the users via HTML pages containing links to the
matching files found.

I expect the combination of tracker as a backend and a commandline
querying tool could be much faster and flexible than the current approach.

Tracker has a daemon monitoring changes in the filesystem and updating
its index accordingly, I guess. Is there an easier way to access
tracker's index via PHP? Some kind of SQL interface may be?

My requirements are basically the same an ordinary NAS has, one can
imagine my Ubuntu box as a NAS box, which offers only an HTML user
interface.

Sorry for my may be nooby questions, but I my linux knowledge is rather
limited at the moment and I didn't find a better place to ask.

Regards
Tiger