Frequently Asked Questions

Is inotify required to run Beagle?

No, but it is strongly recommended. Without it, reliable change notification throughout your entire home directory is impossible, meaning that files that are created, modified, or deleted aren't reflected in your index immediately. Features like live queries won't work in many cases. If you're just trying out beagle, don't worry about building an inotify kernel, but if you plan on running it on a regular basis, you really should.

inotify has been included in the upstream kernel tree as of 2.6.13, so if you are running it or newer, you don't need to do anything to get inotify support.

Binary kernels for many distributions are available from the Inotify Kernel page.

Do I really need extended attributes?

It is strongly recommended. There is an sqlite-based fallback in place, but using this as the primary store is slow and noticably degrades performance.

Does Beagle support NFS?

Yes! As of Beagle 0.1.0, NFS home directories can be indexed. Note however that this will be an extremely slow operation, as every byte of your data has to be transferred between the NFS server and your client desktop. Beagle will index your data locally in a temporary and checkpoint the index back into your home directory every so often.

You may want to look into using Static Indexes for indexing your NFS home directory on the server. Since NFS doesn't support inotify anyway, your home directory won't update in real-time either way, and static indexes will be *much* faster to index.

Does Beagle support Reiser4?

Not optimally. Reiser4 does not support the standard Linux extended attribute interfaces, but instead implements its own. This means that while Beagle will be fully functional, it will be substantially slower than on other filesystems. If/when Reiser4 supports extended attributes, performance will be at least as good as other filesystems like ext3.

Beagle only indexes my home directory. Can I make it index other places too?

Yes, Beagle includes a GUI utility capable of doing this, beagle-settings. You can also use the beagle-config command line utility (use the AddRoot option of the indexing section).

How do I force Beagle to index faster?

Beagle intentionally throttles its indexing based on load and whether the user is idle so as not to adversely affect the user's desktop experience. However, if you want Beagle to index the files as fast as it can, set the BEAGLE_EXERCISE_THE_DOG environment variable when running beagled.

# export BEAGLE_EXERCISE_THE_DOG=1

Does Beagle require root to run?

No. In fact, since 0.0.10 the Beagle Daemon will refuse to run as root. The daemon is designed to handle per-user indexing. This is why it's run as the user, and why it only indexes home directories. (You can, however, add other directories outside of the home directory if you wish)

Does Beagle support Mozilla Thunderbird?

Not yet. Right now Beagle only supports Evolution and KMail for mail. This would make a great project for a prospective Beagle hacker.

Does Beagle require D-BUS?

No. D-BUS was dropped as a dependency in version 0.0.10. It is still a dependency for Galago, however, so if you build with Galago support there is an indirect dependency on it.

Beagle won't index my IM logs in 0.0.12

This is a bug in the 0.0.12 release. It is fixed in the 0.1.0 release.

I upgraded to Beagle 0.1.0 but my gaim logs still aren't showing up

Shutdown beagle, remove the ~/.beagle/Indexes/GaimLogIndex directory, then start beagle again

Beagle keeps looping on my Microsoft Word files

This is a bug in the wv1 software that Beagle uses to index Word documents. You need a patched wv1 1.0.3 package, or upgrade to wv1 1.2.0. See the Optional prerequisites page for more information and a link to the patch.

How can I search only within a directory ?

Currently you cant. However there are a few things you can do to the same effect. You can use the command line tool beagle-query and do a grep on it. If there is a directory with a lot of files that you want to search frequently, then you can build it as a static-index and then search only in that static index. Finally, if the directory in question contains only files with some specific extension (say .pdf), then you can narrow down your search by adding .pdf to your query string.

Does beagle work in KDE ?

Yes it does. Beagle requires some Gtk and Gnome libraries for its internal working but other than that it does not make any distinction between gnome and other desktop environments. Check Supported Filetypes to find the KDE specific backends that are currently supported. However, the current search interface BEST is gnome specific, but that is only the search interface. A new search interface is in development which will hopefully allow kde-specific actions. You can also use the beagle kio-slave (search on kde-apps.org), but it is currently not maintained.
If you want to start beagled on KDE startup, then it is also a good idea of stop it when you logout. You can put a beagled startup script in .kde/Autostart/ and a beagled shutdown script in .kde/shutdown to control beagled startup and shutdown. Use beagle-ping to find out if beagled is already running.

Wasn't there already a 0.1.0 release?

You might be thinking of 0.0.10. Or perhaps 0.0.1. We decided to go with 0.1.0 after 0.0.12 to illustrate the improving maturity of Beagle, and we feel comfortable recommending it for everyday use. That said, it is still beta software, and you should not expect it to be bug free, heavy-duty production-quality software quite yet.

Is there a Beagle IRC channel?

Yes:

Server: irc.gimp.org

Channel: #dashboard

Is there a Beagle mailing list?

Yes, the dashboard-hackers list. Use that list rather than using the Wiki's talk pages for discussion.

This page was last modified 15:45, 8 Feb 2006. This page has been accessed 82685 times.