Are you a regular Beagle user?
I had been merrily Linuxing along for years before Beagle appeared on the scene.
Upon first arrival Beagle was announced as something of a must-have and I accepted it more or less by reflex.
Some month ago I realized that I never used it once. Meanwhile it was hogging my system’s resources and slowing things down.
So I got rid of it. I haven’t missed it once.
Am I somehow weird? What about you? Do you really find Beagle that useful?
No I’m not, although I’d like to be a regular user. I like the idea of finding files based on keywords and so forth. But I can’t stand the random slowing down of my system. I used to have to do the command “ps -aux” and locate beagle and kill it when my system spontaneously ground to a halt.
Not knowing what else tto do, I disable beagle as a matter of routine when I installeach semi-annual new version of SuSE.
But in beagle’s defence we should note that it is well documented in our “docs” with a chapter located here:
/usr/share/doc/manual/opensuse-manual_en/manual/cha.gnome.beagle.html
Removed at install as usual -
Strigi in kde4 also disabled
About as useful as a chocolate teapot 
I found it useful when I used it in KDE3 & Gnome variations of openSUSE. Even with a well organised file system, I find it faster to find a document through search than moving through the file system. Additionally, Beagle provides better search capability within certain apps than the apps themselves.
However since I prefer KDE4 as my desktop and Beagle had a poor implementation there (Beagle didn’t supply results to Kickoff, the Kerry front-end was flaky and many KDE4 apps’ data were not searched without manual intervention) it was too bothersome… especially considering how well it works with some other desktops.
Strigi is also a sort of haphazard thing currently…so system-wide search is half-baked at best in KDE 4 right now. For all the things I prefer about KDE 4, this is one area where currently there is no debate to be had between KDE 4 & Gnome. Many people have complained about Beagle eating up their resources, but I haven’t had that problem with recent versions of the program. The only issue I’ve had with resource hoarding would be Kerry freezing up.
I haven’t tried Beagle in a couple of months though, perhaps it deserves another shot to see if things have improved any.
Routinely prevent it from installing at system installation since the moment it first was eating my resources and I only had a sketchy knowledge what it was about.
That means also that I have no experience with it since.
I have kind of a list, which contains things,
that I should add, configure, etc after fresh install.
Somewhere on the top of the list stays this:
"remove anything beagle ".
If I need search, I use kfind, which is slow, but accurate.
(And doesn’t eat your resources, when you don’t use it.)
So far…Beagle is still troubled on KDE4. Oh well, I’ll just take this as an opportunity to help with testing/bug reporting.
In other news, I have to take back what I said about strigi and KDE4 desktop search. Oh it works, just the implementation is not what I expected. If you run the command “strigiclient” you’ll get a concise gui that lets you add/remove directories, start/stop indexing, and search.
So strigi is functional (and boy does it index quickly!), it’s just the ‘obvious’ methods - such as using the KDE settings panel - that do not.
Feels like a Saturday morning cartoon break, “The more you know”…
zypper rm beagle && zypper al beagle
About wraps it up.
I cannot live without some kind of desktop-search, be it Google Desktop or Beagle.
So, yes, I use Beagle everyday and am thankful that it’s there. Although there still is an unfixed memory-leak…
P.S., I find it a bit absurd that someone who removes beagle directly after installing openSUSE ‘doesn’t miss it once’…
If you don’t use a program, you cannot have a well-based opinion of it.
I agree, Beagle is nothing but a nuisance. I remove it before the first boot because it immediately starts it evil nonsense that has caused me many re-installs!
Also that bloody nepomuk thing, I have no idea what it does, but it also catalogues and slows the system down. A Beagle replacement perhaps?
I just don’t understand all this “context searching” nonsense, if I want to find a file I can simply use the find command.
Any text or picture file I might want is either somewhere in my home folder or on my external drive, I organise my files so I know what is where, hence I rarely need to use any search apps.
Maybe these things are for sloppy, messy, lazy people who place files randomly on their systems?
I think you miss the point that beagle can search by interior keyword, which is different from searching by filename.
Conceptually it’s a very powerful idea IMHO. The idea is a stand-out winner for microsoft (and lately for Google too). But I just don’t like the way beagle seems to force priority control over the resources rather than operating with a priority level that allows me to continue working while beagle is working.
No one here seems to be saying a search facility is a poor idea (except perhaps you are? Maybe?). I think that they are saying there’s a problem with beagle’s priority control of resources.
I think it shows that you have uninstalled beagle directly after opensuse installation for the last couple of releases…
Because it isn’t true anymore.
You cannot question the current status of a software based upon experience more than a year old - or no experience at all, like growbag here.
But when a software (like a person) discredited itself, it is very difficult to gain trust again. And I, for myself, am not going to test beagle each and every (sub)release to see if it bettered its life, as am not realy missing the functionality.
But a thread like this is nice in that it might lead to ome people testing it (again).
On Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:06:01 +0000, swerdna wrote:
> I think you miss the point that beagle can search by interior keyword,
> which is different from searching by filename.
Absolutely. I find it useful on occasion (for example, if I know someone
told me something in an IM conversation but I can’t remember the details).
I think the resource hogging problems/memory leaks aren’t so much a
problem with Beagle itself as with Mono. I find that Mono apps in
general tend to be resource hogs and are plagued by memory leaks.
I use iFolder quite a bit, for example - I depend on it. But I do have
to restart it periodically because it leaks memory all over the place,
and occasionally when it’s working on a sizable directory, it spikes
utilization.
Zypper on 10.x also was plagued by the same problems; also written in
Mono.
It even seems that Evolution uses mono for some things, and I’ve had
performance problems with it as well.
I still consider Mono to be at a technology preview state, and I wish the
developers of major system apps wouldn’t use something in the state that
Mono is in as their development language. Rug (on 10.x, which preceded
zypper) was rewritten in Mono. It was a perfectly serviceable app
before then.
Jim
On Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:16:01 +0000, eet wrote:
> opensuse installation for the last couple of releases…
>
> Because it isn’t true anymore.
Sorry, but it is. I’m running 11.0 and Beagle still hogs resources. Not
as badly as in earlier releases, but it still does this.
Jim
Yes, I often don’t get the point, that’s how I am :).
But it really doesn’t matter if it has been improved, because when I perform a clean install of opensuse 11.1, it runs on first boot and screws things up.
It has a problem with reiserFS, that can only be fixed with updates, and I am not lucky enough to have network running during install to have the updates automatically brought in, hence it messes things up.
And I want to use reiserFS so there! 
Plus it’s normal human behaviour to believe that once you’ve had a bad experience, you are wary the next time.
I learnt this at an early age, as I was 3 years old I would put my finger on the live heating elements of our cooker (back then they were like toasters, bare live 240volt/30 amp wires!).
I would run away crying, then go back and do it again 5 minutes later.
This will probably explain a lot of things about my personality :sarcastic:.
Plus anyway I do not need a file search tool, so for me it’s a complete waste of time and a nuisance :).
On Fri, 27 Mar 2009 16:16:01 +0000, growbag wrote:
> Plus anyway I do not need a file search tool, so for me it’s a complete
> waste of time and a nuisance .
You just don’t have enough files.
I’ve got a very structured filesystem in my home directory - but just
tons and tons of documents that I need for various purposes.
I often resort to grep -r and find, but even then I find that when it
does work fine, Beagle generally helps me more than it hurts.
But I don’t constantly use it either, and I do often kill it when I see
it misbehaving.
Jim
[QUOTE=hendersj;1964456]On Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:06:01 +0000, swerdna wrote:
Zypper on 10.x also was plagued by the same problems; also written in
Mono.
It even seems that Evolution uses mono for some things, and I’ve had
performance problems with it as well.
/QUOTE]Zypper never was written in Mono. Neither is or was Evolution.
Please inform yourself before making claims.