Recommended. Great plugin

i'm looking at the setup tutorial for the solr server, here: http://lucene.apache.org/solr/4_7_2/tutorial.html
do i just need to run the line:

java -jar start.jar

?

or do i need to instal 'jetty' too?
after i run the solr server, do i then just need to follow the instructions listed on this plugin page here?

ok, so i answered the question by just doing it.. 
i think i entered the correct data into the admin panel. so now the indexing is processing locally.

connection timed out..

anything mistaken in these settings?

host: localhost

port: 8983

path: http://localhost:8983/solr/

the solr logger in the solr admin panel is just showing one entry, a yellow warning saying that a new index is being created.
did i miss out a configuration stage with solr here, before running the indexing in elgg?

aha yes. the path needs to just be /solr/
now i see the indexing occuring..
and a big list of errors, such as: 

i just ran some searches - the pages return results - yet visually they are no different to the non-solr searches..
does this elgg plugin add any visual cues to the search results that would let me know it is working?
when i look in the server log now, after a search, i see:
PHP message: Solr HTTP error: Bad Request (400)

There's no visual difference in the search results, it uses the same views for display.

The missing owner_guid error indicates that you aren't using the schema.xml provided with the plugin.  Replace the solr default schema with the one provided, restart solr, and reindex.

oh ok thanks. i copied the schema.xml file and restarted and reindexed (i restarted via the solr admin panel, not the terminal - since i didn't know of a syntax to restart solr via terminal).

now i think solr is being used.

however, when i searched for 'monkey', solr is returning no hits. if i disable solr, then i see several hits via elgg search for that term.
if i search for 'love' then i see hits from both solr and elgg search.. so unless solr is ape-ist - there is some type of config issue to resolve. ;)

That one is a little harder to diagnose...

Check that the 'monkey' entity is indexed first of all.  If it's not indexed it won't get found.  If you have a large amount of content the reindex could take some time, and it's all dependent on the server power and database IO as to how fast that will be.

You can find it in solr directly but going to the query tab and doing a query for:

id:2854

Where 2854 is the guid of the entity.

Also, what kind of entities are you getting results from outside of solr, and where is the term monkey found?  In the title, description, or elsewhere?

there is a category with title 'monkeys' and some items are tagged with 'monkey', some items have the words 'monkeys' in the description and some items have 'monkey' in the title.

i ran a query in the solr admin.. and the correct item was returned there.. so i think that means solar has indexed the item, right? (the database is quite small here, so the issue is not that i am waiting for the indexes to complete).