Desktop Search?

[raid517]

Hi, I am not a coder I'm sorry to say. But I would very much like the help of someone who is. This is just a short note to say that you guys should really consider looking at rlocate. It is a freakingly screamingly good piece of software. One of my biggest woes in Linux was the length of time it would usually take to do a full file search using standard search tools like konqueror - the Gnome tools and other desktop search tool equivalents. When I came here and mentioned this, a lot of guys made out that I might be crazy, or my system must be broken or words to that effect - they pointed out to me that slocate and locate and so on were really screamingly fast - and way faster than anything in the world of Windows.

For a long time this bugged me, because I knew that slocate and locate and other similar tools didn't really do real time file searching (all they did was read from a database, which might be several hours, or even days out of date) and those tools that did do file searching usually took so long to do a search, that they were barely worth using.

All of that ended with rlocate. Now I can search my entire 600GB worth of hard drives faster than I can blink. What's more I can do this in real time too, so that a file I added only a few moments ago, will show up immediately in my search, regardless of where on my system I place it.

What's more I have paired rlocate up with a KDE app called Kiolocate which uses locate to do it's searching, by simply symlinking rlocate to locate and renaming the locate binary.

Having done this I now have something few people in Linux have experienced yet, which is a full blown, lightning fast desktop search capability.

The thing is I am still a little dissatisfied. I happen to think that searching should be obvious - and I do not think that it might be obvious to someone who is new to linux that if they write locate: and then a file name in Konqueror's address bar and then hit return that they stand a very good chance of finding what they are looking for. Why then have an option under 'Tools -> find file " if there is already a much faster, much more accurate way of finding files? So basically my preferred solution would be to somehow find a way to hack the KDE app 'kfind', so that it used kiolocate (and thereby rlocate) by default. Can anyone tell me if this is possible - and if so, since like I said I am not a coder, could you please possibly show me how to do this? Ideally I would just like a hacked kfind binary that uses kilolocate to find, list and display file icons. Even better would be a way to be able to specify to kfind, which internal search engine it should use.

Then at last I think all the wasted time doing searches and trying to find files in Linux will be over.

Any assistance would be deeply appreciated.

Best regards,

GJ

[maquiz]

You may want to look at the Kat project at kat.sourceforge.net. Kat is an application for KDE designed to index files.
Progress is pretty fast and goal is an KIO-slave. Ebuilds are downloadable.

[nightm4re]

And of course, Beagle must be mentioned.

[raid517]

There is something of a difference here though. Kat works at the application level, rlocate (in conjunction with Kiolocate) works at the OS level - that is it is intergrated (via a module) as a core part of the OS. While Kat may take several seconds or minutes to scan an entire drive - and may consume significant resources while keeping it's data base up to date, I can scan my entire drive in milliseconds - while consuming virtually zero resources - and I can do this in real time too. (Indeed I can do this literally faster than I can blink).

I'm not sure if Beagle is still a live project. I haven't heard much from it in ages.

In any case, having been used to slow or imprecise searches in Linux for so long, having this capacity really does feel fairly revolutionary.

GJ

[gentoo_lan]

Beagle is an active project. Beagle is a gnome project which you can check out at http://www.gnome.org/projects/beagle/

[Jazz]

Awesome.. was looking for something like dis myself.. As i use KDE, i;d rather settle for the rlocate and kiofind method, but what troubles me is the thought that wouldnt the normal read / writes get crawlingly slow ?

I mean, try untarring a kernel source with dis.. will it not take much much longer ? if someone ould give real world times, it wud be great determining what method would be the best..

Beagle is cool too, only thing is we gotta use gnome to access its gui (or not ?)..

I'd be trying dis out shortly

BYe,
Jazz

[raid517]

There is exactly zero decrease in speed.

GJ

[Jazz]

What's more I can do this in real time too, so that a file I added only a few moments ago, will show up immediately in my search, regardless of where on my system I place it.

dosent seem to be happenin for me this way, got the rlocate running, perfectly.. replaced the locate by rlocate, and kio_locate runs fine.. but it fails to find the file i just create..

I had to re run updatedb for the file to be included in the search results.. am i missing something ?

BYe,
Jazz

[raid517]

am i missing something

Yes you probably are. I had similar problems initially. Let me stress that setting this up was not easy, it took me 3 days to get it going and work through all of the problems (hence my enthusiasm when I finally did it).

Exactly what it is you are missing at this time is impossible to tell due to the involved nature of several of the required steps - but hey, you are a Gentoo user, so you should be able to work through it and figure it out.

Suffice to say that rlocate is not just a simple replacement for slocate or locate. It exists to enable you to do real time file searches. If it is not doing that for you at the moment, then this would indicate that it is simply not correctly configured yet.

You should refer to the docs to try to figure out why this is the case.

GJ

[Jazz]

Yeehoo, lol damn u're right i'm a Gentoo user ! lol, i couldnt sleep unless i was done wid it.. so shortly after postin it, i checked the install docs for rlocate.. i was missing some permissions, and the command to start was very crooked.. i had to manually point it to the rlocate database..

so i used the command to start the rlocate daemon

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##start rlocate
sudo /usr/local/sbin/rlocated -no /usr/local/var/rlocate/rlocate.db &

i'm using the new initng, init system , so couldnt get the daemon working via rc-update, neways this seems to work just as good

Ahh well, that being said, i just love the way everything is soo instant., copy a file, rename it do whateva, and its ready to be searched instant !

Umm although, in my opnion.. kio_locate is missing on some things, like forst of all bein able to specify if we want a incase sensitive search, also what dir's to search for etc etc..

I believe there should be a better frontend to this rlocate search, or perhaps one of the search app's should make use of the rlocate backend !

I LOVE GENTOO

BYe,
Jazz

[raid517]

Kiolocate isn't perfect yet, no... (Nor is rlocate). Like it would be cool to be able to tell it what type of files to search for, or to simply search a specific directory, or to exclude certain types of files from a search, or to catogorize files by size, type and so on. But it is early days. If you would like these features, perhaps you could contribute to the development of both of these applications?

Also please don't forget to lend your support an encouragement to the authors. It can't be easy for them to do these things without knowing that there are people out there that appreciate their work.

GJ

[rasto.l]

Yeehoo, lol damn u're right i'm a Gentoo user ! lol, i couldnt sleep unless i was done wid it.. so shortly after postin it, i checked the install docs for rlocate.. i was missing some permissions, and the command to start was very crooked.. i had to manually point it to the rlocate database..

so i used the command to start the rlocate daemon

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##start rlocate
sudo /usr/local/sbin/rlocated -no /usr/local/var/rlocate/rlocate.db &

You should be able to start the daemon without any options

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sudo /usr/local/sbin/rlocated

or use gentoo init script from contrib directory.

What probably happened to you is, that you created the database for the first time with updatedb command without any options.
You can create the initial database like this:

/etc/cron.daily/rlocate

where correct options are present, or with

updatedb --initdiffdb

from command line. In next version of rlocate this will not be requiered.

hth,
Rasto Levrinc

[reynolds531]

I've been running beagle for a week or so and think it's great. There's an installation guide on the gentoo wiki and a long thread here. If I understand correctly, rlocate and kio_locate only search file and directory names. Beagle indexes the contents of files (text, pdf, html, openoffice docs, evolution email files, the firefox cache, and maybe others). Search results are amazingly fast.

The only drawback is that it currently only indexes the /home directory. I understand that's being addressed in cvs builds, though.

[_loki_]

running updatedb or updatedb --initdiffdb gives me an error about a missing configfile..

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warning: updatedb: could not access /etc/updatedb.conf: open: No such file or directory

is that something to care about?