To enable searching with partial words eg. returning records that contain 'linux', when user queries only for "lin", you need to add following options to the sphinx.conf:
index name_idx
{
...
min_infix_len = 3
expand_keywords = 1
}
and just run the indexer.
Now it is possible to search for articles using only part of the words, eg. lin fedo
will return posts associated with (among others): linux and fedora.
To find texts with words in different forms then the ones used in query you need to use lemmatizer or stemmer dedicated for the language:
index name_idx
{
...
morphology = stem_en
}
Results: