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A better, faster desktop search for Linux!

gnome.org — Beagle desktop search, while useful, tends to consume way to much system resources, which leaves out Linux users that care about high performance or have older machines. Tracker is a high performance search engine written in C, uses only 3-9 megs of ram and is very Laptop-friendly. Features nautilus and deskbar support for seamless integration.

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  • XVampireX, on 10/12/2007, -3/+18Let us not forget about Strigi for our KDE folks :) http://strigi.sourceforge.net/
    • nonpareil, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14C'mon, how could we ^ever^ forget about Strigi for our KDE folks? Be serious!
  • diggapleaze, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15I can attest to the performance of tracker. This thing is maddeningly fast at indexing the whole FS without turning all your fans on like beagle. This needs to get merged into gnome-main for 2.20 big time.
    • bestadvocate, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I have about 500 gigs of data on a computer with 512 ram, as you might imagine, beagle brings my computer to a standstill, do you think that with my rather lopsided computer I might still get such a reaction from this leaner tracker?
    • mikal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I agree that Beagle has problems. I often have to kill beagled-helper because of it consuming too much CPU for the computer to be usable (3000+ AMD, 1 GB mem). It also refuses to find stuff I _know_ is there (e.g. phrases from PDF archive) and has been in the same directories for months.

      Will check out both this one and Strigi. The concept is too good to let go of.
  • dukeinlondon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Let's hope file type coverage expands rapidly....
    • Noctem, on 10/12/2007, -15/+4It's open source. Why not modify it yourself?
    • chrono13, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13"Why don't you do it yourself?"

      You first.
      Seriously though, I hope you are against the open source development model and attempting to attack it, because in no way does OSS = having to do it yourself.

      Punishing and patronizing the end user just because of it's development model is worse than "RTFM n00b!"

      Sure, everyone can contribute. Submitting rewritten documentation, reporting bugs or *requesting features*.

      However, even experienced developers don't usually just 'do it themselves' for several reasons. Most don't have the time, those that do simply don't want to dive into weeks or months of learning another project just to develop some minor feature that any of the current devs could do faster and better because they are much more familiar with the code and the project. Even if you do add such a thing, it may get scrapped because it is poorly written or is in the way of the design.

      In most cases it makes more sense to request from the current devs than to dive into their pond and muddy it up.
  • avihappy, on 10/12/2007, -7/+1The Spotlight of Linux is here!
    • Rockyrowks, on 10/12/2007, -8/+2but how do you compile? I always forget.....
    • diggapleaze, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5you don't. you type:

      sudo apt-get install tracker

      Or you can use a GUI like synaptic or gnome-app-install
    • OsakaWilson, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1An application isn't finished until it has a functioning installer. A second best would be a description of how to install which covers ALL the steps necessary to successfully install the application. Tracker has neither of these.

      The following is the entire set of directions for installing Tracker on Edgy:

      Ubuntu Edgy (x86 arch) - add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list
      deb http://debs.michaelbiebl.de/ edgy main
      (download this GPG key and import it into APT using "sudo apt-key add biebl.asc")

      This is basically useless to me and everyone else who doesn't know where my /etc/apt/sources.list is.
    • mjpatey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Osaka, you're wrong.

      sudo aptitude install tracker

      or

      if you want to do it the long way... open synaptic, search for "tracker" and install the packages it displays that start with "tracker"

      Either way, done!
    • NJHewitt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7@osaka, your /etc/apt/sources.list is in /etc/apt/
      it's the file called "sources.list"
    • EbilPhish, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3@OsakaWilson
      Instructions can only be made to suit people to a minimal level skill.

      My mum couldn't understand 'Close the window' until i told her to click the X, now if you are going to tell someone to click the X maybe you need to inform them of how to use the mouse and what clicking is. While the Windows for Workgroups 3.11 installer might have done this, I think its a bit excessive for posting information about how to install a development search engine under Linux, if you really can't follow that level of instructions and don't have the ability to look it up, then you shouldn't be worrying about a few mb of memory that Beagle takes over this (new, development, untested, probably missing features yet to be coded) alternative.

      If you really cannot understand how to add one line of text to a file and cut and paste a command then buy a mac, although that might be to advanced still.

      If the search engine is decent and has been developed enough then it will probably find its way into a future version of Ubuntu by default, but development software isn't going to magically end up on your system.
  • Recuso, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7locate/slocate always worked fine for me ;P
  • kraniac, on 10/12/2007, -10/+3I need to learn to read, digg this down
  • emblemparade, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18Even more than I appreciate its ass-kicking performance, I appreciate that Tracker allows me to get rid of Mono, which is required for Beagle.

    There's just no excuse for writing such an essential application in a virtual machine. What were Beagle developers thinking?! And a Microsoft-ish technology, no less!

    (Java makes me happier, but *not* when it's used unecessarily. Can we rid OpenOffice of it?)
    • carrett, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4Sure, but then the OO devs would have to create a port for every single OS instead of just having work with a JVM. I'm sure that portability is a big part of the reason OO is so Java-heavy. AFAIK, that's the main/only reason to ever use Java.
    • diggapleaze, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@carett:

      Actually OO runs just fine without java. You can turn it off in the options. It actually makes it run faster. OO.o devs are phasing out the java dependence of OO.
    • carrett, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice#Java_controversy

      It's not completely phased out yet.
    • saden1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@carrett

      Does it need to be free of Java now that Java is GPL'ed?
    • Chandon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2carrett - You do realize that C++ runs on even more operating systems / platforms than Java does, right? If you use Standard C++, no porting is required for any of those systems (well, mostly - but the exceptions aren't relevant to an app like OpenOffice). It's true that there are a couple places where an application *must* diverge from Standard C++ to be useful, but those are mostly GUI issues and are easily covered by cross platform GUI toolkits (Gtk, Qt, WxWidgets, etc). It's extremely unlikely that Java solves any cross platform issues that haven't been solved already in a cross platform GUI application the size of OpenOffice.
    • emblemparade, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Exactly. OO.o uses Java for things like database connectivity, such as HSQLDB and JDBC. But aren't there perfectly portable C solutions for databases?

      I don't mean to put down Java *at all*. HSQLDB is a decent relational database implementation, and just what I needed for certain projects. However, for a office suite, there are much better options.
  • Zonged, on 10/12/2007, -6/+4Why do people need to search their computer? I've never forgot where something is lol
    • bestadvocate, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Subdirectories man
    • selrahc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Shouldn't the question be why do *I* need to search for things on my computer then? Other people do forget. Sometimes people aren't looking for a file that they put on the computer either.
    • Xenogis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I rarely lose files also. In my home directory I have "Pictures" "Videos" "Programs" "Documents" and "Desktop" then inside those directories there are more directories until I get very specific of the file type. It is really nice.
  • reb42, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I know where most of my files are, but typing a filename is quicker than navigating to a directory. And certainly you never forget things...
    • bejayel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Not every distrobution of linux keeps all of its conf files in the same place. I believe in fedora, their menu.lst is an link to grub.conf in /etc, whereas in gentoo i just modify grub.conf. in /boot/grub.

      Just because you cant use a commant line and configure your os as much as i can doesnt mean searching is useless.
    • reb42, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1bejayel: exactly
    • diggapleaze, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@bejayel

      I hate to be pedantic, but fedora keeps menu.lst in /boot/grub like everyone else. Point taken anyway :)
  • bigtrouble77, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I just replaced beagle with tracker. Beagle has been a hog lately so I've been looking for an alternative. Tracker indexed my entire system in about a couple minutes, supports deskbar and integrated with nautilus. So far it's friggin' amazing.
  • Ramble, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Nice.
  • bwesterman, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1dope.
  • tmahmood, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Very nice application, pretty fast. Its available in Ubuntu Feisty Universe repository.

    Few drawbacks though, like result display is not informative enough, it should, at least display how many items were found, have to edit configuration file manually to customize, and didn't find a way to manually index data.
  • cybermage, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Um, raise your hand if you were doing the installation of tracker and got to the following instruction:

    "Once you have installed Tracker and have some indexed contents, you should now compile Nautilus"

    Screw that. I'm not into self flagellation. I just want a package to install. I'm okay compiling the downloaded sources, but if you expect me to recompile 1/3 of my desktop environment you can jump in a lake.
    • digdug2020, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2quit being such a hater, if you would have looked you'd see there are other options like a gui for search as well as an applet you can add to a panel.
    • Wyzard, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Or wait until it becomes more mainstream and distributions compile Tracker support into Nautilus by default.
  • stenico, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Tracker is crazy, crazy fast and works extremely well. I followed Beagles development from the start, and at a comparable stage in its development it absolutely, absolutely sucked, and is only just about usable now. Sorry to say it but Tracker being this good already means Beagle is as good as dead and gone. Clearly however we should still give the Beagle guys a lot of credit for their vision and getting the nix desktop search show on the road... Quite often working out the right way to do something requires that many different methods are tried, and it doesn't surprise me that the first approach isn't always the best.
  • Stonekeeper, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1A kick in the teeth for mono for sure!
  • snnycl, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0the best
  • adila01, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Why care about Beagle when Google will port their Desktop search sooner or later like they did with the Mac. When that happens, Linux will become much much more enjoyable to use!
    • Schalken, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Yeah but chances are Google Desktop is going to be horribly integrated into the rest of GNOME/KDE. Will you have the option to do a desktop search from within Nautilus or with Deskbar? Unlikely. If they do port Google Desktop they're probably going to use Qt like they did with Google Earth which makes it look horrible on both Gtk and Qt desktops because they linked the libraries statically.

      If companies want to know how to port their apps properly to Linux look no further than Real Player. It looks like a real GNOME app and at the same time they didn't have to release the source code. Everyone's happy.
  • jake3988, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Huh? Something /faster/ than 'locate'?

    Locate is almost instantaneous. Windows a search on a large computer could take 5+ minutes. Linux is smart because you can just index the files and search in an instant.
  • ceplm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0locate doesn't search on CONTENT of the files only on their filenames.
  • babyphat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0thanks for sharing. I like this desktop search.

    http://www.babyphatshoes.us
  •  

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