KDE: desktop search

rohan28 · Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2005 3:53 am Post subject: KDE: desktop search

Hi all,

While us KDE users are waiting for KDE 4 and a real desktop search program, there are some alternatives around. I gave Beagle a try, but I didn't like having to install a whole bunch of Gnome dependencies, and the search frontend wouldn't let me open documents in my KDE programs; I looked around some more and found a desktop independent indexer and managed to get it to index my KDE data (KMail, Kopete logs, Konqueror web cache), as well as all my OpenOffice, MS Office, PDF etc documents.

Now, on my system, I can search (and do regular expressions on) the text of my documents with a Konqueror search shortcut (like gg:). All this without even running a daemon :-)

Of course, this is just a temporary solution until we get a real KDE desktop search program, but it works surprisingly well. For anyone who is interested, I have put up a HOWTO here.

Enjoy :-)

NocturnalCoffeeMan · Posted: Thu Jan 27, 2005 3:41 am Post subject:

yeah, google has something like that for winders, we need that now
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radfoj · Posted: Thu Jan 27, 2005 5:13 pm Post subject:

Hi and thanks for yours howto.

I tried it and it really works, but not exactly how I want. I have problems with indexing.
1) Why is it not indexing my KMail messages?

icefox13 · Posted: Thu Jan 27, 2005 7:54 pm Post subject:

rohan28 · Posted: Thu Jan 27, 2005 11:58 pm Post subject:

Yes, that's right, Namazu initially selects files to index by file extension. You should be able to make it attempt to index all files by having this line:

radfoj · Posted: Fri Jan 28, 2005 10:42 am Post subject:

iverson0881 · Apprentice Joined: 08 Jan 2004 Posts: 285 Location: CA

I currently use beagle on KDE and i love the thing but there really isn't a way to change it from nautilus to say some other file manager. Any file manager?

I mean there has to be a way. It's not like they're gonna lock themselves with Firefox for web browsing and evolution. There tons of people out there that use Thunderbird or Opera. There must be some default open setting thats built-in somewhere and should be able to be modified.

Yama · Posted: Mon Apr 11, 2005 2:20 pm Post subject: Namazu is great!

Thanks for the HOWTO. Namazu fits the role of a desktop search tool very well. It's not quite as good as Beagle (technically), but it works without any fuss. It took me ages to get Beagle working, and even then it was crash-prone. Beagle will get there eventually, but Namazu is the best tool right now.

Illissius · Guru Joined: 31 Jul 2004 Posts: 395 Location: Hungary

There's also this. (Don't use anything of the sort myself, as I tend to remember where I put stuff...)
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Yama · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2005 11:22 am Post subject:

Does anybody know what setting I need to use to tell Namazu to scan all files which don't have extensions? I save a lot of data in plain text files, and I normally don't use a .txt extension.

Headrush · Posted: Mon Apr 18, 2005 3:39 am Post subject:

rohan28 · Posted: Mon Apr 18, 2005 10:36 am Post subject:

Beagle now has an HTTP based interface (like Google Desktop Search), so you could view that with Konqueror, and any links clicked would respect your KDE file associations - just like the Namazu interface. Unfortunately, there's still no way to build it without all the Gnome dependencies (and I guess there never will be... )

joefish · Guru Joined: 27 Jan 2004 Posts: 316 Location: New Zealand

I followed the HOWTO, when I try and use namazu as indicated, I get: a dialog box saying "Open 'cgi:/nmz?query={@}'?".

I'm using KDE 3.4 with the split ebuilds. According to KInfoCenter I do have CGI available as a kioslave.

Any ideas?