brunjes
November 5th, 2009, 05:05 PM
I've tried Beagle. I've tried Tracker. Both suck frankly. They do not reliably index my files and certainly do not index .pptx, .xlsx, .docx files (which I get by the boatload from my office workers and the web as part of my job).
Tracker was broken in Jaunty and now with Karmic, it won't index anything but stuff in my /home directory (and yes, I told it to visit other locations in the file system and it simply does not index them). And the complaint about indexing Microsoft Office 2007 formatted documents still stands. And the man page says run the trackerd program with -R (syntax error) or with --force-reindex (no syntax error, but does not do anything either).
It is amazing to me that with 1 TB hard drives a reality for desktop systems that people do not miss indexing capabilities much (or so it seems). I'm a fairly organized person but with more than 250 thousand files to search through, it's just not feasible to think that I can quickly find the documents I'm looking for without a search engine helping me. I do use 'locate' but of course that is only good for searching for filenames, not searching by file content.
Oh, and Google Desktop is also not an option -- already tried that and it also did not cut the mustard.
Is anyone working on this actively?
Microsoft does this, Apple does this ... it cannot be that hard if Microsoft can make theirs work with Vista (gasp). If Ubuntu wants to be a viable desktop replacement play they are going to need this functionality to work as reliably as any other major desktop tool they bundle with Ubuntu.
Tracker was broken in Jaunty and now with Karmic, it won't index anything but stuff in my /home directory (and yes, I told it to visit other locations in the file system and it simply does not index them). And the complaint about indexing Microsoft Office 2007 formatted documents still stands. And the man page says run the trackerd program with -R (syntax error) or with --force-reindex (no syntax error, but does not do anything either).
It is amazing to me that with 1 TB hard drives a reality for desktop systems that people do not miss indexing capabilities much (or so it seems). I'm a fairly organized person but with more than 250 thousand files to search through, it's just not feasible to think that I can quickly find the documents I'm looking for without a search engine helping me. I do use 'locate' but of course that is only good for searching for filenames, not searching by file content.
Oh, and Google Desktop is also not an option -- already tried that and it also did not cut the mustard.
Is anyone working on this actively?
Microsoft does this, Apple does this ... it cannot be that hard if Microsoft can make theirs work with Vista (gasp). If Ubuntu wants to be a viable desktop replacement play they are going to need this functionality to work as reliably as any other major desktop tool they bundle with Ubuntu.