desktop searching: HOWTO?

thomas fisher studio1 at commspeed.net
Sun Dec 23 19:15:14 UTC 2007


On Sunday 23 December 2007 06:06:25 John DeCarlo wrote:
> On Dec 23, 2007 4:57 AM, Alain Muls <alain.muls at telenet.be> wrote:
> > I tried google-desktop, beagle, tracker to perform search on my local
> > hard disk the way it does on my son's iMAC. But all in vain.
> >
> > None of these search engines was able to index my latex files, pdf files
> > and thunderbird mails. How can I tune one of them so that these items
> > get indexed?
>
> I only know about google desktop.  Here is what I have done to improve the
> defaults, which sounds like it would help you, too.
>
> Go into Google Desktop Preferences.  It should be in your menu if you are
> installing from the Google apt repository.
>
> I went and added my /home/user/.mozilla folder (yours may be different, I
> think Ubuntu may use .mozilla-thunderbird), on the theory that it is a
> hidden folder and I am not sure how it finds your email directory.
>
> Very importantly, under the Display section, make sure that the search box
> defaults to your local files - my default was the web.

If you want to go beyond point and click you might give these power commands a 
go:

   From the command line:
   1)  "locate" and or "slocate"  both operate upon the "updatedb" data base. 
I believe the updatedb is a standard in Ubuntu.
   2)  "grep"      
   3)  "find"
   4)   If you want to increase your power learn some about:
          -  "regular expressions"  { regexp }
          -  " * "  the wildcard specifier.
   5)  To learn more about the useage and syntax of these commands use the
        " man  locate " to access the resident knowledge base for " locate "; 
etc.
note: When working at the command level " MC "  { midnight commander } a take 
off from Peter Norton's DOS filecommander is very convenient and powerful.

An overview of some OS indexers 
http://www.infomotions.com/musings/opensource-indexers/ 

->  swish++     http://www.searchtools.com/tools/swishpp.html

Hope this may be of use.
Tom

 





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