SOLVED
See my answer below. Question left unchanged for anyone else who has trouble with this.
I'd like to use lucene (or anything else that could be used withs symfony for searching really) however I can't get the sfLucene plugin to work (says there are no tasks in the namespace "lucene" when i do ./symfony lucene:initialize). What can I do to get this to work or replace lucene?
symfony info:
chris@linux-9r49:~/Coding/PHP/cpn> ./sf -V
symfony version 1.3.0-BETA1 (/home/chris/Coding/PHP/cpn/lib/vendor/symfony/lib)