Nithin Kamath’s Weblog

My recent initial experience with beagle had raised my hope that i will be able to use beagle full time on my system. But considering that my system has only 256 MB ram that to with 32 MB of that being shared with onboard graphics meant that Beagle was resulting in too much thrashing and all the application were begining to slow down. So i had to stop the dog on its traces and my alternative method is to let the dog on the scanning every weekend or so. Lets see how this works out.

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.