| SUSE LINUX Documentation Part IV. Office / Chapter 14. Using Beagle | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | 13.5. Working with KPilot | 14.2. Searching Data |  | |
| SUSE LINUX Documentation Part IV. Office / Chapter 14. Using Beagle | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 13.5. Working with KPilot | 14.2. Searching Data | | |
Table of Contents
Beagle is a search tool that indexes your personal information space to help you find whatever you are looking for. You can use Beagle to find documents, e-mails, Web history, Instant Messenger and ITC conversations, source code, images, music files, applications, and much more.
Beagle supports the following data sources:
File system
Application launchers
Evolution mail and address book
Gaim instant messaging logs
Firefox Web pages (as you view them)
Blam and Liferea RSS aggregators
Tomboy notes
It also supports the following file formats:
OpenOffice.org
Microsoft Office (doc, ppt, xls)
HTML
Images (jpeg, png)
Audio (mp3, ogg, flac)
AbiWord
Rich Text Format (rtf)
Texinfo
Man pages
Source code (C, C++, C#, Fortran, Java, JavaScript, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python)
Plain text
Beagle automatically indexes everything in your home directory, but you can choose to exclude certain files or directories. Beagle also includes a variety of tools that you can use to search your data.
The Beagle daemon (beagled) automatically performs all indexing. By default, everything in your home directory is indexed. Beagle detects changes made to your home directory and reindexes the data accordingly.
Files are immediately indexed when they are created, are reindexed when they are modified, and are dropped from the index when they are deleted.
E-mails are indexed upon arrival.
IM conversations are indexed as you chat, one line at a time.
Indexing your data requires a fair amount of computing power, but the Beagle daemon tries to be as unobtrusive as possible. It contains a scheduler that works to prioritize tasks and control CPU usage, based on whether you are actively using your workstation.
If you want to prevent a directory (and all of its subdirectories)
from being indexed, create an empty file named
.noindex and place it in the directory. You can add a
list of files and directories to the .noindex file to
prevent those files and directories from being indexed. Wild cards are
permitted in the .noindex file.
You can also put a .neverindex file in your home
directory with a list of files that should never be indexed. Wild cards are
also allowed in this file. Use the same wild cards as you use for
glob (for example, f*le??.txt). You
can also use more powerful regular expressions by adding a forward slash
both before and after your pattern (for example,
/file.*.txt/). For more information, see the glob-UNIX
Web site (http://docs.python.org/lib/module-glob.html).
Beagle has an effective system for determining when to index your files and it tries to not interfere with other applications you might be running. It intentionally times its indexing based on load and whether your system is idle, so as not to adversely affect your desktop experience. However, if you want to index your home directory right away, enter the following command in a terminal window before running Beagle:
export BEAGLE_EXERCISE_THE_DOG=1
Beagle includes the following commands to let you see the current indexing status:
Displays how many documents have been indexed and what type of documents have been indexed.
Displays the current work the Beagle daemon is doing (on an ongoing basis).
