I have this need for desktop search, as I have a lot of documents and a lot of emails, and sometimes finding what I need can be a pain.
In the past, I’ve always used Beagle, and Beagle has always been fine. There’s no Beagle applet in KDE4, but I’ve been using the KIO slave, and that’s been okay.
What’s not been okay is that sometime after I upgraded to OpenSuse 11, Beagle has decided to index everything in my home directory, and the config options seem to do nothing. For instance:
Doesn’t seem to add anything to the .beagle/config .xml files. And the option for searching the home directory is always “true”, even when I use beagle-config to set it to “false”.
Annoyingly, beagle-config will confirm it’s setting it to “false”, but then if I rerun “beagle-config FilesQueryable” it’s true again.
Is Beagle as shiped with OpenSuse 11 hosed, or am I doing something wrong?
Or… should I be using Strigi? If so, will Strigi search emails, microsoft word documents, openoffice documents, and PDFs?
I’ll answer my own question; just in case anyone ever comes looking for it.
Strigi does not, as yet, index Microsoft Word documents.
Beagle, as shipped with OpenSuse 11, has a bug and will not honor your configuration settings if you tell it not to index certain directories or to disallow certain backends (Locate, NautilusMetaData, etc). Update to a newer version and all is well.
>
> I’ll answer my own question; just in case anyone ever comes looking for
> it.
>
> Strigi does not, as yet, index Microsoft Word documents.
>
> Beagle, as shipped with OpenSuse 11, has a bug and will not honor your
> configuration settings if you tell it not to index certain directories
> or to disallow certain backends (Locate, NautilusMetaData, etc). Update
> to a newer version and all is well.
>
>
try recoll and/or tracker much less use of resources and no mono
Suse 11.0 x64, Kde 4.1beta (factory repo), Opera 9.x weekly
locate and find, as far as I know, aren’t proper replacements for Beagle/Recoll, what have you.
For example, if I have gigabytes of email (which I do), I can’t just type “Websphere MQ” and watch search results appear near instantly.
Yeah, I just tried Recoll and I have to admit it is blindingly fast and really efficient. I’m going to try installing a few more of the backends it needs, but so far, so good.
For example, if I have gigabytes of email (which I do), I can’t just type “Websphere MQ” and watch search results appear near instantly.
Yes you can. Why not? Since locate uses its own database it is extremely fast (compared to ‘find’). Also I did not say it is a replacement for Beagle and the like, its a different approach, yet I am able to work with it and be very satisfied.
If you need permanent indexing and a GUI, you may not be satisfied with it, of course.
Just to clarify, we’re talking about apples and oranges here.
Locate is a brilliant tool, I use it all the time and it smokes the other indexing apps, if all you’re looking for is the location of a file.
Beagle, strigi, et al. index the content of files (and mail etc.), and you generally do searches based on what the file contains or how it is meta-tagged, instead of what the file is named. They also update in real time, as opposed to locate, which relies on a cron job to update the database (rendering the results potentially inaccurate if you’ve added or deleted files since that last time updatedb was run).
Both have their place, but they’re complementary, not really comparable.