Google Desktop Search equivalent

Drone4four · 05-14-2007, 11:36 PM

I need an application which will allow me to search a monster index of academic word documents for Slackware GNU Linux the same way Google Desktop Search does for win32.

Beagle seems to be the most popular for linux, but it requires extensive gnome/gtk deps which slackware doesn't have. So what do you use? And what should I use?

rworkman on FreeNode suggests I use "slocate(1)". Wtf is that?

Drone4four · 05-14-2007, 11:41 PM

rob0 explains that in Slackware, slocate / updatedb is installed and working by default if you leave the machine running overnight.

Nem · 05-15-2007, 12:41 AM

Read this as it works for me,
and is very fast too.
http://shilo.is-a-geek.com/slack/search3.html

H_TeXMeX_H · 05-15-2007, 11:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Drone4four

rworkman on FreeNode suggests I use "slocate(1)". Wtf is that?

Remember, if you ever ask yourself this question, run 'man slocate'.

msantinho · 05-15-2007, 12:59 PM

Drone4four is asking for an application capable of reading and indexing file contents, not file names.

titopoquito · 05-15-2007, 01:33 PM

recoll is very nice ( http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/ ). I needed to install three other packages (antiword, unrtf and xapian) but it indexes rtf, doc, odt, txt, pdf ... and the search is very fast. You can even get a preview. And it handles umlauts ok if you need them.

gstath · 05-15-2007, 04:34 PM

Apart from recoll that it is already suggested, you can also try

- beagle: http://beagle-project.org/Main_Page
and
- Kat: http://sourceforge.net/projects/kat/

I've not tried kat so I can not make any comments. Several months ago I tried Beagle which is quite ok.

GS

Alien_Hominid · 05-15-2007, 05:03 PM

Pat could include http://en.opensuse.org/Kerry into his kde release to facilitate searching.

erklaerbaer · 05-15-2007, 05:37 PM

beagle has a lot of dependencies, so i think the chances are pretty low:
http://beagle-project.org/Installing_prerequisites

http://pinot.berlios.de/ looks promising, but still has the occasional bugs.
recoll looks nice. but one really has to take a closer look at its source code.

don't hold your breath for one of these to be included anytime soon.

EDIT:

titopoquito · 05-16-2007, 03:41 AM

pinot and recoll look very similar, at least in its dependencies, but pinot adds some new dependencies like gtkmm, libtextcat, Google SOAP API ... I'm glad I found recoll first or second after beagle, else I would probably have given up frustrated from all the extra stuff they need.
It was really easy to build on Slackware with only one minor hazzle (antiword insisting to install to /usr/local, until I manually edited the Makefile).

Hangdog42 · 05-16-2007, 07:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gstath

- Kat: http://sourceforge.net/projects/kat/

I've not tried kat so I can not make any comments. Several months ago I tried Beagle which is quite ok.

GS

I tried Kat once and vowed never again. As far as I'm concerned this is one of the worst pieces of software ever written. It grabbed the CPU and absolutely would not ever let go. Ever. I let it index overnight and it STILL wouldn't release the CPU.

Besides, the last release was a year and a half ago. I'm not sure this is a live project.

Ugh.

salmaklak · 05-16-2007, 05:14 PM

Recoll works nicely for me. Light and fast, easy to compile, indexes when I tell it to rather than adding to the clutter running in the background. Helped me find stuff since the latter half of my uni course when I started using it.
I tried Kat initially, but had bad experiences with it, and as someone says above the project is dead as far as I can tell too.
I had a quick butcher's at Novell's desktop when it came out with Beagle to see how Beagle works, and while the search part was alright I personally don't like things running in the background eating up resources. I'm not sure if Beagle has got lighter since me trying it out back then. For me it felt like a huge gorilla that wasn't particularly quick on it's feet compared to Recoll.
YMMV.

Hangdog42 · 05-17-2007, 07:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by titopoquito

recoll is very nice ( http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/ ). I needed to install three other packages (antiword, unrtf and xapian) but it indexes rtf, doc, odt, txt, pdf ... and the search is very fast. You can even get a preview. And it handles umlauts ok if you need them.

I want to say thanks for mentioning recoll. I hadn't run across it before and it was EXACTLY what I was looking for.

Thanks!

titopoquito · 05-17-2007, 02:32 PM

recoll acts even nicer if you don't want to index your whole harddisk but just have some folders with documents. You have to fiddle around with the recoll.conf file but this way the indexing goes even faster, especially if your documents change often this will save some time.

adriv · 05-17-2007, 05:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by titopoquito

recoll is very nice ( http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/ ). I needed to install three other packages (antiword, unrtf and xapian) but it indexes rtf, doc, odt, txt, pdf ... and the search is very fast. You can even get a preview. And it handles umlauts ok if you need them.

I installed antiword, unrtf and xapian, but recoll won't compile.
Running MAKE gives this:

Code:

bash-3.2$ make
cd lib; make
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/adri/Desktop/recoll-1.8.1/lib'
g++ -g -O2 -Wall -Wno-unused  -I. -I../aspell -I../bincimapmime -I../common -I../index -I../internfile -I../rcldb -I../unac -I../utils -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/X11R6/include -DRECOLL_DATADIR=\"/usr/local/share/recoll\" -DLIBDIR=\"/usr/local/lib\" -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -D_GNU_SOURCE -DPUTENV_ARG_NOT_CONST -DHAVE_VASPRINTF=1 -DHAVE_MKDTEMP=1 -c ../index/csguess.cpp
../index/csguess.cpp: In function `int transcodeErrCnt(const char*, int, const char*, const char*)':
../index/csguess.cpp:82: error: invalid conversion from `const char**' to `char**'
../index/csguess.cpp:82: error:   initializing argument 2 of `size_t libiconv(void*, char**, size_t*, char**, size_t*)'
make[1]: *** [csguess.o] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/adri/Desktop/recoll-1.8.1/lib'
make: *** [all] Error 2
bash-3.2$

Anyone an idea what's wrong?