Submitted by “For years now, the Linux and open-source desktop has had the benefit of multiple software projects pushing forward to create nicer-looking, more useful environments. One of the most prominent of those projects, GNOME, recently underwent one of its twice-yearly updates, and the result is a compelling set of refinements. The newest version of GNOME, 2.14, now graces the desktop of Red Hat’s Fedora Core 5 and other shipping and soon-to-arrive Linux distributions.”
I just installed Deskbar today on Ubuntu Dapper, and I already have (almost) fallen in love with it. It does a really good job of integrating the various components of the desktop, to make it more of a whole.
Let me tell you people, Deskbar is pure gold.
Yes deskbar is very nice indeed and nautilus beagle intergration is really nice and fast. I just love Beagle and gnome support for it, never been so easy to find files, web history.
of desktop searching is really tempting. I was also a big fan of spotlight but as time past, it became useless more or less. When I had some files about 40-50 GB, it was delightful to use spotlight but as my harddisk becomes loaded 160GB it turns to pain. However, I still use spotlight but not very much. Last time I checked Beagle, it required huge memory and lots of cpu cycles. Is it getting better now? I hope so.
yes a lot.
i felt jealusy from my other pc with xp and google desktop. especially that i am used to much to it.
but beagle satisfied me now.
Edited 2006-04-22 23:27
Weird. I get to opposite impression. Open source apps seem like they are constantly being tweaked and improved far longer than the closed source equivalents. Look at the gnome games for example. They have kept improving far past the checklist state. While minesweeper on windows looks and acts the same as it did on windows 3.1 gnome mines has been steadily improving. They have made the interfaces scalable, improved the score handling and tweaked the controls.
Oh and ontopic: desktop search is neat, but I agree that they are all just too heavy. The annoyance of my computer running slower is worse than the gain I get from the search functionality. This is why Tracker intrigues me. They are focusing on performance and memory usage. If their claim of “typical RAM usage 4 – 6 MB” is to believed they are onto something good.
Tracker’s memory usage (average of 6MB ram even after indexing 10GB of docs) and performance (barely noticeable impact on most CPUs) is reality – I challenge anyone to prove otherwise (I am the author of Tracker). I developed Tracker on a 1GHz P4 with only 256MB RAM and it runs like a dream.
For me, a good well behaved daemon should not have a noticable impact on the system (after all its invisible to users) and not consume way too many resources nor leak memory and therefore threaten system stability. I have made Tracker meet those goals as best as I can.
see page : http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Tracker fopr more details (i know I need to add more info to that page).
Tracker is also a powerful metadata database and contextual linking engine and will be able to deliver first class object support out of the box. It will also be on trial as a common music database for rhythmbox in the near future.
Tracker is also freedesktop compliant and does not depend on gnome and I am quite keen in the near future to introduce it to other desktops like XFCE and its file manager Thunar (and who knows maybe KDE too?)
Edited 2006-04-23 12:47
In our tests with typical desktop workloads—Firefox with multiple tabs open, an OpenOffice.org document or two, the Evolution e-mail application and Beagle quietly indexing in the background—Beagle was typically the first or second largest user of RAM. When running GNOME with Beagle and all its bells and whistles, we recommend 1GB of system RAM for best results.
And that’s why I don’t use any of these search tools. Even though my machine has easily enough power (Athlon 64, 1GB RAM) I just don’t search enough to make it worth the resources. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I actually want to use my resources for applications, not gimmicks. If I need to find something then I use the regular search and wait 5-10 min. No big deal, since it only happens about once a month.
More valuable to me would be a beagle-type tool that only indexes when I tell it to (like say, overnight) and then quits. When I want to search, I can start it up, but I don’t want it running all the time and sucking up resources. Oh wait, that’s locate + cron.
To me, the tradeoff is absolutely not worth it, even on a fast machine.
leos wrote:
> More valuable to me would be a beagle-type tool that
> only indexes when I tell it to (like say, overnight)
> and then quits. When I want to search, I can start it
> up, but I don’t want it running all the time and
> sucking up resources.
Give Pinot a try. It lets you index your files selectively and you can do nightly updates using the omindex tool. For more information, visit :
http://www.gnomefiles.org/app.php?soft_id=1214
qqq
Edited 2006-04-23 03:27
Beagle, OSX Spotlight, and Google desktop are all part of the relatively new trend in operating systems aimed at find what you quickly with fewer mouse clicks and less user responsibility (in terms of maintaining an organized filesystem).
The benefit of having these database-like search capabilities built into the operating system is that the responsibility of organizing and maintaining information (i.e. files) is shifting from the user to the system designer.
The Google search engine brought us extremely fast and reliable search capability. Many people now set their home pages to a site containing a Google search box, because it allows the user to immediately access websites they are looking for. Perhaps ironically, it often costs fewer mouse clicks type a website into a google search box than to locate it in a bookmark menu or an address history.
Desktop search brings this idea to our home PC’s. In OS X, for example, I’ve found myself typing application names into Spotlight rather than sifting through Finder to locate the application I want to run. It’s just faster that way.
The key to all this working, which you hit on exactly in your post, is that the user must be given instant search-result gratification in order for it to be useful. It sounds like Beagle isn’t quite there yet from your post, although from what I’ve experienced, Beagle is a great tool and is coming along very nicely.
As natural language processing improves, and as desktop search technologies are developed further, it should be an interesting time for operating systems.
Sure.. you could continue to use cron + locate and waste your time searching.. or you could give up 20MB of your 1024MB which you probably aren’t using anyways for super fast searching that returns much more relevant results than locate.
Or get rlocate.. the point is that enabling these new technologies comes only at the cost of ram because the actual process itself is heavily tied into the filesystem (inotify) and kernel and thus doesn’t really take any cpu time at all. rlocate doesn’t even need to be run using cron, but it’s small daemon does need to be running.
I don’t know.. i guess the point is that people should stop complaining at new technologies eating their resources. I feel this is espically the case from linux users who complain when everything doesn’t fit in their 256MB of ram.
I’ve been running both rlocate and deskbar on my laptop with ext3 for the past year (i started with the early beagle stuff) and I never noticed a slowdown caused by those programs.. for the most part they sit pefectly idle only consuming an insignificant amount of ram compared to my 1.25GB.. and even then my system is only using 250MB with everythign running.. the rest is just for caching purposes so my hard drive doesn’t have to spin up.
I hardly ever use Spotlight. Maybe it’s because I like to keep all my files organised. It’s very handy for searching through emails. It’s nice to have around ’cause it can come in handy now and again. Say, for example, when I was revising for exams and I had all my lecture notes saved on my hard drive, when looking for the answer to a specific question, I could find it straight away.
If search needs that many resources though, I could definitely live without it.
Beagle is not a part of Gnome, although the deskbar to allow you to use whatever search mechanism you want is.
The resources it consumes also makes its benefits fairly negligible. Its certainly the first thing I’ll turn off in Suse 10.1. I already have the ability to search through KMail and Evolution directly for my e-mails, and I will simply do a simple locate type search whenever I want to look for files. The overhead that something like Beagle puts on your machine makes it not worth using for the extremely limited amount of time you’ll actually use it.
The lesson is pretty clear. Future search technology is going to have to be integrated more transparently into the functions of the desktop, and not require a massive service to be watching over everything you do and every file you save.
even slower than Spotlight.
I don’t understand how BeOS as old unsupported and crusty as it may be; still to this day has features that Windows, OS X, and Linux Distro’s are still trying to achieve. BeOS’s search function makes Spotlight look craptacular.
It’s the Linux Checklist mentality (otherwise known as “good enough”) at its finest. Copy any and all features as quickly as possible: make ’em work later. Which is sad. Beagle is great start; but like many projects that gets the checkbox filled; it may start to languish in further development. Only time will tell.
Hindsight is 20/20. I remember the zealots claiming (with a straight face) FVWM95 was “just as good” as Windows 95 explorer shell. Now of course Linux in those days WAS in MANY ways superior to WIN95, the gui was NOT one of them.
Checklist mentality, I like that – exactly the feeling I have had for many years regarding Linux GUI development – no attention to detail and everything much slower than in Windows (while claiming the opposite). But hasn’t this started to change a little in recent years?
I don’t understand how BeOS as old unsupported and crusty as it may be; still to this day has features that Windows, OS X, and Linux Distro’s are still trying to achieve.
Because the people who designed BeOS had some forethought and built those features in, not as an afterthought and a panic reaction to something someone else is doing.
Beagle is great start; but like many projects that gets the checkbox filled; it may start to languish in further development.
That’s spot on, and definitely about the size of it.
Yes but Spotlight and Beagle are not the same as the BFS attributes. Spotlight and Beagle (and Google Desktop) actually go out and scan files, index them by content and provide you are search mechanism not too different from the Be search tool.
Don’t get me wrong… I don’t thing anything will ever touch BeOS and am still anxiously awaiting the first release of Haiku, so we can finally look to a future for the BeOS, but the be query/search tool is not as powerful as Spotlight and Beagle. But it would be WICKED cool if someone created a process that scanned files and added attributes, or created one giant attribute file that backlinked for a similar sort of search.
Haiku people? Listening? 
It’s the Linux Checklist mentality (otherwise known as “good enough”) at its finest. Copy any and all features as quickly as possible: make ’em work later. Which is sad. Beagle is great start; but like many projects that gets the checkbox filled; it may start to languish in further development. Only time will tell.
Beagle must have been in development for around two two years, the first public release was in June 2004. It was a lot more resource hungry back then. In the intervening time it has become more polished and performance keeps improving. So it’s no quick knock off copy, in fact I’m pretty sure it was demoed in public before Spotlight was.
I don’t understand how BeOS as old unsupported and crusty as it may be; still to this day has features that Windows, OS X, and Linux Distro’s are still trying to achieve. BeOS’s search function makes Spotlight look craptacular
I don’t know for other OS, but I know that in the case of Linux, there is at least one explanation : Linux solution works on several platforms.
It’s the Linux Checklist mentality (otherwise known as “good enough”) at its finest
I don’t understand. What is so Linux about “Checklist mentality” or “good enough” as you call it ?
What is this nonsense really ? The community is not one big beast with one head you know.
Checklist mentality (or “good enough”) is perfect to describe an entity like MS, but in the case of FOSS, I wonder.
Especially in this case, as I think beagle is rather one element of Dashboard, which had been abandonned, the idea of which was presented in 2003, which means Dashboard was in development at least since early 2003 (I don’t know for Beagle).
And initially, the plan was not to wait for beagle to finish.
Copy any and all features as quickly as possible: make ’em work later. Which is sad
Which is only your view actually. I have a very hard time relating what you say to Linux or FOSS. Are you referring to Windows here ? Perhaps I misunderstood you.
Because what you describe is typical of Windows. Take USB for example.
In Linux and FOSS, the policy is rather to implement things that work, else it is rejected.
If what you said was true, there would be only a negligible amount of feature requests in the many FOSS bugzilla … which is not the case.
Furthermore, the FOSS solutions works on several OS, which makes these solutions immediately more useful than any proprietary ones.
And they work as soon as they are released, not later. Bugs are fixed then.
I would have agreed with you if you talked about performance, which is improved once everything works.
Beagle is great start; but like many projects that gets the checkbox filled; it may start to languish in further development. Only time will tell
Beagle is only a component in the Dashboard scheme …
I remember the zealots claiming (with a straight face) FVWM95 was “just as good” as Windows 95 explorer shell. Now of course Linux in those days WAS in MANY ways superior to WIN95, the gui was NOT one of them
Excuse me ? Why do you call these people zealots ?
Why is it so hard for you to understand that some people could have found FVWM95 “just as good” as Windows 95 ?
Do you remember the nightmare that Windows 95 was ? In many ways, FVWM95 was better than Windows 95, and in the days, I did not use it on Linux, but on HPUX.
HPUX was the OS of the big fast machine I was using, and having the GUI on it made it way better than working in Windows 95.
Strangely enough, to some narrow minded people, saying sth is better than anything Windows makes you automatically a zealot. That’s the sad thing.
We/linux fans should look over the fence more often and use Windows from time to time.
Windows Desktop Search had a very similar in function “bar” applet for almost 2 years. You can do searches, run shell commands, and this thing would suggest things to you as you type. I wanted this functionality for ages on KDE.
Now, if anything, this thing showing up in Gnome only probably shows that Gnomies actually need to use other systems once in a while and see what’s there.
I wish “quarterly sabbatical to other OS” would become mandatory for hard-core Linux coders.
Now, the way it usually goes, the KDE version of Deskbar will be out on kde-apps in a few ours. (crossing fingers)
I don’t know if there is a deskbar-applet equivalent for KDE yet, but Kerry is a simple but KDE frontend for Beagle.
I don’t know if there is a deskbar-applet equivalent for KDE yet, but Kerry is a simple but KDE frontend for Beagle.
I sounds like konq has much of the deskbar functionality already, though I haven’t used the latest Gnome so can’t say for sure.
About Kerry, I must say that I’m actually pleased with how well it does work. Suse and Novell put a lot of effort into making beagle/mono a standalone subsystem, and Kerry + the beagle kio_slave does a very good job of integrating search into KDE. I had my doubts, particularly after everything I’d read about beagle in the past and even more particularly after the issues Suse had with the mono-based package management subsystem, but resource utilization etc. hasn’t really been an issue that I’ve seen. In fact after I installed Suse 10.1 I didn’t even notice when beagle went to work indexing my home directory.
Color me impressed.
That’s very interesting. How about you concentrate your efforts on making nautilus not crash every five seconds, or getting it to play wmv files without having to rename them to asf files.
Jesus christ.
Nautilus rarely crashes on my system running FC5 and Gnome 2.14. Perhaps you need to upgrade and remove all oll config files.
actually i really think the KDE guys would be interested in Tracker. their own development on tenor hasn’t really started yet, and if Tracker is able to deliver what KDE needs (or is able to accommodate to their needs) it might very well turn up in KDE 4.0
why not introduce it on some mailinglist or wiki?
actually i really think the KDE guys would be interested in Tracker.
Well my current plan is to make a few more adjustments and complete a stable architeture first (im adjusting the dbus interface to deliver first class objects) then approach the other desktops. Tracker is already nicely integrated in Gnome (the nautilus search interface especially is super fast) so I will have time to pursue other desktops.
Tracker also uses Glib for threads so I dont know how KDE will react to that but if GStreamer is going to be part of KDE4 then it should not be a problem.
The deskbar-applet is more than just a shortcut to beagle. If you choose you can have it search the dictionary, open disk drives, shared network places, and open files. This is configurable by tick marking your preference through a graphical interface. Even better is the option to search Google after you get a key from Google which is freely available. It really is a very handy tool; however,I can appreciate the reservations of some users regarding memory usage. Presently firefox is consuming 55.8 MB, beagled 44.6 MB, and deskbar-applet 28.2 MB. These are the top three applications in memory usage.
well, the gstreamer integration will be entirely optional, as KDE’s Phonon will be independent from any particular backend. the duplication glib brings to KDE won’t be liked, but it has been done before – aRts needed glib too (it was meant to be a DE-independent backend, pity only KDE adopted it despite the glib dependency).
I usually run updatedb during my “web-surfing time” and then I use locate to find stuff. However I don’t even have enough data to use locate because usually, I just know where the stuff is