Now -- I had installed Beagle on Sarge last year at some time and, well, it was a pain in the ass. Sure, it installed, I had no trouble rebuilding my kernel, etc., etc., etc but there were issues. I was kind of let down because I really wanted a desktop search. Copernicus is not for Linux, that Google offering wasn't either and the only desktop search I could find for Linux was Collective Cortex which, at this time of writing is offline, apparently. It worked but was a road-hog and a java app. I'm not always down with java apps.

Anyway it worked but it was kind of a chore. So I basically wrote off the desktop search idea for Linux...until Etch.

I knew that Etch would have it because there are many distros out there with Beagle as part of the desktop app collection. However, you can have those distros. I'm a Debian man, we're a Debian household.

Installing anything on Debian is cake. Well, pretty much. There are dependency issues for some things but those are few and far between and can be remedied quickly. Installing Beagle was no different. In Synaptic I right-clicked on Beagle, marked it for installation, yes to the dependencies and 1 minute later it was installed.

After install I immediately fired up the search widget. I got to it by my Applications menu. Applications --> Accessories --> Search. Upon immediate install beagled is not running, so any searches will fail. That's no big deal because Beagle will tell you straight-up -- "...is not running, start it now?" or something like that. The correct answer in this case is "yes".

I added my music directory for indexing as well as my /home and the demon quickly ate up all that data. I was finding stuff immediately.

However, it took about a day to fully index my box. Might have been earlier, but I'm busy, man -- can't hang around on my box all day. At this point in Beagle's development, or, implementation on Debian GNU/Linux (Etch) is limited. You cannot search for your music, for example. It's basically indexing text files and images from what I can tell. It's also indexing your Gaim logs - if you keep such things.

In order for Beagle to find relevant entries in your Gaim logs, you must have chosen to log all chats, etc. from your Gaim preferences. Now, for some this is not an option. I regularly converse with ne'er-do-wells that would skin me if they thought I was saving logs of our communications. I don't log their communications, but I log others and Beagle finds the stuff I'm searching for post haste. It's really a kick-ass little program.

The default install of Beagle will index your /home directory and start with your machine. If you look in your session properties (Desktop --> Preferences --> Sessions ) you will notice an entry for beagled. All in all I have noticed that the daemon is not sucking all of my system's resources. My machine is still snappy, for what it is, and I can play all my desktop nonsense with no noticeable hold-ups. Of course, it's balmy summer and in New England that means the same hot ans nasty as id does everywhere else: point is I'm running athcool in the background and I've got NO problems. You may remember a really sarcastic article I wrote on Athcool last year.

So that wraps it, Etch has Beagle and you can install it from command line

# apt-get install beagle

or use Synaptic. Beagle isn't the end-all-be-all desktop search on Etch just yet, however, it works, it's sweet and I'm really loving what Debian is cooking up on Etch.

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