Searching your ubuntu Desktop with beagle

Beagle is a free desktop search tool which is gaining popularity with several applications. You can search your desktop just as you search with google. It is possible to use beagle as a standalone search tool or integrate with applications such as firefox for easy desktop search. In fact, it is one application that any serious Linux user can not ignore.

Installing beagle

On ubuntu 9.04, beagle is available in the universe repository. You can install it using

$ sudo apt-get install beagle
The beagle package for other distributions are also available . Look at the beagle project home page.

What does it do ?
Once installed , beagle is run as a daemon in the background. It will start indexing the following information based on the configuration.

Documents

Emails & attachments

web history

IM/IRC conversations

addressbook contacts

calendar appointments

notes

source code

images

music/video files

archives and their contents

applications

The indexing is done in real time . Files are immediately indexed when they are created, are re-indexed when they are modified, and are dropped from the index upon deletion.E-mails are indexed upon arrival. IM conversations are indexed as you chat, a line at a time. Web pages are indexed as you view them.

Using beagle

You can use beagle in several ways. The easiest way is to use the graphical interface. Click on Accessories --> Search . You will get the following search screen.

You can type the search query in the text box provided. The result are shown in the second panel. You can preview the results by clicking on the result. There are several command line options you can try. Please look at this page for more details.

You can do beagle queries from the command line too.

$ beagle-query blog

The above command will search for blog in the beagle index.

Similarly, you can print status of the beagle daemon with

$beagle-status

Adding beagle to firefox

There are two possibilities with firefox.
a) Index all web pages that you browse
b) Use firefox as client for beagle search.

a) You can index the pages you browse using beagle. Download this extension. Save it to your hard disk. Inside firefox, click on File->open and then select the downloaded xpi file. It will prompt you to install the beagle extension. Restart firefox. A small icon will appear near the bottom corner of your browser window. You can control indexing by clicking on that button.

b) Now let us configure fire fox as a client for beagle. You can add an entry like google search box to firfox and do local searches. For this enable network web interface in beagle.
Open beagle gui search from accessories . Click on Search->Preferences -> network options. Check enable web interface for local search. Now click on this link. It will install beagle search for your firefox.