Description of problem: The new Places > Search seems non-functional. When I enter "fedora" into the Find: field, it first says the daemon is not running. After I start the daemon with the provided button, it then returns No results were found. Then, while I was writing a post to feora-test-list it came up with a list of Conversations that it found - from Evolution posts to this list. No files were reported, though locate could find many containing "fedora". Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): [root@fc5t3 ~]# rpm -q beagle beagle-0.2.1-6 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Select menu Places > Search 2.Enter search string ("fedora") in Find: box 3. Actual results: Daemon is not running, After daemon runs, no files found Expected results: A list of files containing "fedora" should be output. Additional info: Fresh install of FC5T3 from DVD.
The beagle daemon only indexes your home directory by default. If you have no files with the word "fedora" in your home directory then you may find it will return nothing. There is also the use-case where the first time that the daemon is run, it will start to index your home directory, untill data with the word "Fedora" in it is indexed, it will not return any valid results. First question: Do you think it is a bug that the search daemon is not started by default ? Second question: Can you reproduce this behavior again , after the system has had time to index your home directory ?
Thanks for the reply. Answer to First question: Yes, I think it is a bug that the daemon is not started by default. When I use whatever GUI search tool is provided, I expect it to come up running in a useful way. The user shouldn't have to start the search daemon and then wait for indexing to occur. Answer to Second question: Yes, this time after about a minute, the Conversations category came up with results, and a second category Documents came up with some results from signatures to mail-list postings. A question from me: Why doesn't indexing occur for the whole system instead of the home directory? I am frequently looking for some system file when I do a search. Another question: How can I make the daemon start automatically, and how can I make the indexing occur globally? Yet another question: Does the indexing follow links in the home directory? Since I use several Linux systems installed on the same computer and want my data available from each of them and want it to persist when I install a new system, I keep all data in a separate partition and link to it in my home directory. If indexing doesn't follow links, then the search doesn't even do an adequate job of finding any of my own data files. I think the answer is that links are not followed, since personal files and my personal e-mail folders in my data partition did not pop up in the search. Thanks. Gerry
So, indexing of the whole system is done by a cron job running /usr/libexec/beagle-crawl-system. Unfortunately, it was installed as a cron job, so it only worked if your system was up at 4:30am. I have changed it to an anacron job in beagle-0.2.1-8 It also installs an autostart file now, which causes the daemon to run in user sessions by default.
The daemon now starts automatically. I have selected / to be indexed as well as my home directory. When I enter "fedora" without the quotations in the search box, it still only shows items from mail messages. Locate finds mamy files on my system with "fedora" in the name. Why doesn't beagle find them? What can I send you to help in understanding the problem? [gerry@fc5t3 ~]$ rpm -q beagle beagle-0.2.1-11
beagle-search only searches the files in your home directory and the additional paths that you set up in the search preferences. The system indexed stuff that gets run in cron is only searched by the help system (yelp). This is a design decision to avoid "normal user searches" become full of system files. If you want to do things differently you need to set up additional indexing paths.