Linux desktop search

Posted by Vivek Gite [Last updated: January 4, 2006]

Sure find command can do all the work (if you are a hardcore Linux user) for you. However, new Linux user need something that allows them to search stuff right from Linux desktop (no command line). They want utility that indexes files on Linux desktop PC and displays results in search engine style page(s) just like Google/Yahoo desktop search. Unfortunately, Google or Yahoo desktop search works with windows desktop. Nevertheless, Linux comes with Beagle search utility.

We have recently converted (read as upgraded) few users to Linux desktop and guess what, they demanded desktop search tool that can search:

Documents
Emails
Web history
IM/IRC conversations
Source code
Images
Music files
Applications
And much more, right from Linux desktop.

Most of these users are either office users or programmers. They are switching to Linux desktop because:

Programmers find it more challenging, secure, and other colleagues are using so they would like to try it out
Office users find it secure and virus free environment

Gnome project has tool called Beagle. It is a search tool that ransacks your personal information space to find whatever you're looking for. Beagle can search documents, emails and much more. Its indexing sub-system and search aggregator built on top of the Lucene indexer.

Installing beagle
Debian user can use apt-get command to install it:

# apt-get install beagle

Fedora core user can use yum to install it:

yum install beagle

Configure File system
a) Beagle needs xtended attributes support on /home partition by adding user_xattr options field for your /home mount point in /etc/fstab file.

# vi /etc/fstab

Modify your /home line:

/dev/hdb2 /home       ext3    defaults,user_xattr        0   2

b) Remount the /home filesystem

# mount -o remount /home

# mount -o remount /dev/hdb2

Extended attributes are used by Beagle to keep track of which files have been indexed and which need to be re-indexed.

Automatically start beagled service
To run eagled service automatically when you log in your GNOME session, you need to add it to Start Programs in Session Manager as follows:

Click on Gnome Desktop menu > Preferenses > Sessions
Select Startup Programs tab
Click on add > Type /usr/bin/beagled as a startup command. Save the session.

Logout and login again. Please note that if this is the first time login i.e. you run beagle first time, you will need to wait a bit for the daemon to index data from different locations before you can get any result.

Start searching with beagle

To start beagle click on Application > Accessories > Select Beagle search

References:

General information on Beagle
Installing help for Gentoo, MandrivaLinux, SUSE, Ubuntu Linux distributions
Finding/locating files with find command part I and part II

Next time will see a small amount of tips and tricks related to beagle
If you are looking to perform google search from Desktop then you can try out Gnome applet called Deskbar. I do not recommend this applet as it is in beta and google restricts you to 1000 queries per day.

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Discussion on This Article:

whitty Says: January 10th, 2006 at 9:14 am
you can also try “locate” for searching files - uses cron triggered indexing and much more efficient than find.
Anonymous Says: January 15th, 2006 at 12:40 am
There are other free desktop search tools for unix and linux, for example kat http://kat.mandriva.com/
or recoll
http://www.recoll.org