How I got Beagle working on Mandriva

[Guest Mat_London]

Posting this in case it is useful to any other Mandriva users who fancy having a look at Beagle.

Its a Gnome search tool similar to Google desktop search or Spotlight for OSX Tiger.

Its very impressive, particularly if you are using it with an inotify enabled kernel as real time updates are fed to the search tool. Examples here:

 

http://sebgate.f2s.com/demos

http://nat.org/demos/

 

This assumes you have some linux knowledge

I have added pasted stuff from the Beagle Wiki here too.

 

Firstly install Mandriva Linux 2005 LE ( I upgraded over my 10.1 install )

Add Cooker main & contrib to your urpmi sources

 

We are going to install Beagle 0.0.10 which requires Inotify 0.23

So we will need kernel-multimedia-2.6.11-9.mm.3mdk as far as I can work out all the other available kernels I have looked at are using Inotify 0.22 which will not work.

 

Inotify is turned off on this kernel by default, so it will need to be turned on at boot time.

Fire up drakconf and go to the boot section and add inotify=on as a kernel arguement to the new kernel.

Mine now looks like this:

 

acpi=ht resume=/dev/hda6 splash=silent inotify=on

 

Extended attributes are used by Beagle to keep track of which files have been indexed and which need to be re-indexed. You will need to set extended attributes on the file systems that Beagle is indexing.

 

Your kernel will need support for extended attributes on the filesystem you are indexing. For Reiser3 and ext2 filesystems, the default kernel config does not enable the attributes. For ext2 filesystems, the kernel option for attributes is CONFIG_EXT2_FS_XATTR. For ext3, it's CONFIG_EXT3_FS_XATTR. For Reiser3, it's REISERFS_FS_XATTR.

 

To set extended attributes, you should add the user_xattr property to the relevant file systems in your /etc/fstab file. For example:

 

/dev/hda3 /home ext3 defaults,user_xattr 1 2

 

You can then remount the affected partitions as follows:

 

# mount -o remount /home

 

Also note that neither Reiser4 nor NFS support extended attributes, so Beagle presently will not work on these filesystems.

 

Reboot into the new kernel

 

Double check inotify is running by running dmesg | grep inotify

You should get something like this

 

[mat@Matspc ~]$ dmesg | grep inotify

inotify device minor=63

 

Using Mandrake Software Management or urpmi to install Beagle 0.0.10

All the minimum packages to run Beagle will also be installed including Mono 1.1.7

 

Before starting Beagle also install the following.

Wv is used to parse Microsoft Word files. Beagle requires version 1.0.x. wv2 will not work

For Mandriva install the following

wv

libwv-1.0_2

libwv-1.0_2-devel

Pdfinfo is a program which can extract text and metadata from PDF files. Beagle requires this program to parse and index PDF content. It is a part of the xpdf distribution. Note that this is a runtime dependency and not a compile-time dependency, so you do not need to reconfigure/rebuild Beagle to take advantage of pdfinfo.

For mandriva install xpdf

Ssindex is a program which can extract metadata from spreadsheets. Beagle requires this program to parse and index spreadsheet data from Gnumeric and Microsoft Excel files. It is a part of the gnumeric 1.4 distribution. Like pdfinfo, this is a runtime dependency.

For Mandriva you will need to install the gnumeric package.

 

Firefox.

Jon Trowbridge (http://www.trowbridge.org/) has kindly hosted the Beagle Extension for Firefox. You can download it from:

 

http://www.trowbridge.org/beagle-on-debian/beagle.xpi

 

You can then install this in Firefox by going File --> Open File and selecting the beagle.xpi file. After restarting, Firefox and Beagle, your web history will be indexed.

 

Finally in a terminal type beagled or beagled --fg if you want to see what the daemon is up to.

The Beagle search tool can found in the Mandriva menu under System > File Tools > Beagle Search alternatively type best into a command prompt, you should get something like this.

 

[mat@Matspc ~]$ best

Rendering

Done Rendering: .50s

WARN: GConf key '/apps/Beagle/keybindings/show_beagle' does not exist, using default.

DEBUG: Binding key 'F12' for '/apps/Beagle/keybindings/show_beagle'

If you're wondering whether Best is working: check your notification area (system tray)

 

Hope this is of use to someone, for more info look here

 

http://beaglewiki.org/Getting_Started