My favorite is to just use
find from the command line; the
man page for find is reasonably detailed, and gives a range of examples. However, the search is not indexed, so it can be slow if you are looking through a large hierarchy, and is not suited to content searches.
The standard Gnome browser Nautilus does have a search (menu go->search-for-files), but it is rudimentary, and again, if you are looking after an indexed solution, does not meet your requirements.
There are quite a few indexing search packages in the Debian collection. Some are oriented more towards metadata, others towards content searching. Probably the first of these is what you are looking for.
- meta tracker (has Gnome integration)
- xapian (highly scalable content search backend, some tools)
- namazu (content searching)
- strigi (cross platform)
- doodle (metadata searching)
- swish++ (CGI based)
- pinot (front end for xapian)
- recoll (front end for xapian)
- mlocate (indexed implementation of locate)
- catfish (front end for other packages, possibly orphaned)