More and more documents to keep track of and less time to organise, this was my situtation since the past few days. I had to do something to be able to find the documents quickly and without much searching. This is when i remembered Beagle, a search utility written in Mono which comes with the distro. I had removed it earlier since it was eating up too much ram.
So with 4 months down since FC5 was released I hoped that Beagle would have been developed and optimised well enough to suite my needs. I used yum to install/update it from ‘updates repo’, Beagle itself is very small about 2MB approx, but the dependencies are huge, mainly due to Mono, hence the total download required was ~23MB, which i hesitantly went on to download even though my download/upload cap is 400MB. I ran Beagle and wanted to see what improvement have been there since I last used it, so went to the beagle site.
Only then did I realise that the Beagle provided by Fedora repo is 0.2.6 as against the latest version which is 0.2.8. This raised my curiosity about what additional features were there between these two releases, one main new feature immediately caught my eye - Thunderbird support. This was a missing feature, since earlier only evolution was supported and I used thunderbird.
I quickly downloaded the tar file and began compiling it. The ./configure had only one dependency issue which was solved by installing the devel package for that dependency. Issued ‘make’ and ‘make install’, and then ran /usr/bin/beagled, only to find that the beagled i started was still the 0.2.6 ver and not the one i complied. Issued a quick ‘whereis beagle’ command and found the one I compiled was in /usr/local/bin directory.
Then i quickly added the following commands to the session startup of gnome, viz. (i) /usr/local/bin/beagled (ii) /usr/local/bin/beagle-search –icon
Currently the /home and some other directories are getting indexed, and it does not seem as heavy on resource as it was when i tried it out with the version which came with Fedora. Let me use this for a week or so before passing my verdict.
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August 19th, 2006 at 10:37 pm
I’ve tried almost all popular desktop search software (Y, G & MS s/w). I liked them all, but then i never started *using* them. I just happened to know where exactly my docs were. So, i havent been using for quite sometime now. But, one place where it really helps is in searching offline-mail.
August 20th, 2006 at 7:57 am
Hi Sharath, exactly, i haven\\\’t tried out the popular desktop search software you mentioned, but beagle searches inside the documents as well and shows a single line context of where the search term appears in the document, and since it searches all possible applications I use, it is great.
As regards the searching of offline mail is concerned, i use thunderbird and it has its own powerful search inside it itself, but you know its great to have a single application to search all types of documents from.
August 21st, 2006 at 1:08 am
>> but beagle searches inside the documents as well
searches PDFs also!
Thats the same with all other software as well
I’vr heard fspot is pretty cool and in some ways better than Picasa. You use it?
August 23rd, 2006 at 5:29 pm
I was initially using fspot but since Picasa was released for Linux, i have been using picasa. F-spot is good, but since i don’t have a digital camera, i just need to manage my existing photos. Fspot(which i tried) did not allow me to import whole folders by itself, i.e. folder name should be imported along with photos. Also since not all my photos have exif info, I needed to change the date for the whole folder, which fspot did not provide for. But overall considering that fspot uses Mono and is still in very early phase of development along with Novell pushing it, i believe fspot will emerge as the best software of the lot.
November 11th, 2006 at 10:06 pm
I do not think Beagle is as useful on Linux as Apple’s Spotligh is on Mac OS X. The reason? - Linux apps is not as gracious with metadata as Mac OS is. Most applications do in fact ignore there presence completely and many remove them if they are present.
November 11th, 2006 at 10:13 pm
@Aleksandersen: Currently Beagle may not be that useful, but it should be taken into notice that it is still in its early development stage, so with time the features will grow. With regard to the fact that most applications ignore the presence of metadata, I was not aware of this, have to look into that.