nepomuk and strigi - what and how

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#1

Hi, I am using opensuse 12.1 on a Lenovo 3000 V200 laptop. I also have it installed on other machines, with KDE 4.8.2.

I have noticed that ever since I enabled strigi, my computer is always indexing. It never stop, except after about 2 hours of indexing. This is fine, except that I would expect that if I turn off my computer at night and then reboot in the morning, the files it has indexed would not need to be indexed again. However, it seems to always start over indexing from the beginning whenever I reboot, so I am wondering if there is something wrong.

In any case, I am also wondering what benefit does nepomuk/strigi actually give? I certainly want to have fast searches, but when I click “find” in dolphin, I cannot tell if it is searching any faster than before when I had it disabled. Is the dolphin “find” function linked to nepomuk/strigi? Or is there some other interface I have to use to take advantage of the indexed files?

Thanks
George

#2

After each reboot Nepomuk is just looking for new/modified files. This is
probably not necessary if you are the only user and you have only one OS
installed. But it is much faster than indexing files.

Consider the following scenario:
You have Linux and Windows installed and one common partition to share files
between the two OS. To have easy access to the shared partition you mount it
on /home/youruser/Documents/windows in Linux. Now, Nepomuk will also index
all files on this partition.
When you boot into Windows modify files on this partition and then boot into
Linux, there is no way for Nepomuk to tell if there are modified files in
/home/youruser/Documents/windows without scanning all files.

This is only one example why Nepomuk has to scan all files after you log in.

One big advantage of Nepomuk is that you can search files not only by there
file name but also by content. I tested this with text and pdf files and it
works quite nice.
Second, if you use Kontact or any of KDEs PIM tools you also need Nepomuk.
Most of them use Nepomuk as backend for indexing and searching mails,
contacts, appointments …

#3

Ok, thanks for that info - makes sense why it has to scan all.

As far as searching with Nepomuk, is there a separate search application or GUI that you use to search with Nepomuk? Or does the find utility in dolphin automatically use Nepomuk when it searches?

#4

Sounds to me like you need to know a little more about it. Here’s a complete tutorial on what & how to use nepomuk/strigi
Desktop Search - Nepomuk Strigi & Faceted Browsing - Kubuntu 10.10 - YouTube
If it should turn out you don’t want it you can do this:

  1. KIckoff>Configure Desktop>Desktop Search
  2. Uncheck the Enable Nepomuk Desktop Search box click Apply
    3.Open up ~/.kde4/share/config/
  3. find the kdedrc file add this line if it’s not there or change the line to read that file like so
[Module-nepomuksearchmodule]
autoload=false

Just in case you don’t know ~/.kde means /home/yourusername/.kde4

#5

Thanks for the link to the tutorial. That was very helpful. The fast indexed search is very helpful to my work, as I am working in 3 languages and I need to be able to quickly find the use of a particular word here or there in a text document. Glad that Nepomuk and Strigi are working well now and now I know how to use them. :slight_smile:

George