Spotlight/Search on Fedora

Question

I apologize for the MacOSX reference, but is there an equivalent of Spotlight-Search in Fedora, specifically FC14 x86_64 ?

Answer 1

A few releases ago, there was a big push for something called Beagle, which is a "personal space" search tool. I'm not quite sure why that push died out, but the package is still part of Fedora and you can install it with yum install beagle-gnome if you are a Gnome user or yum install kerry for the KDE front-end. There are also optional beagle-firefox, beagle-thunderbird, and beagle-evolution packages which cause those programs' data to be indexed.

There's a number of full-text indexers / search engines available for Fedora as well, like Namazu, Xapian, Strigi, and Pinot, but as far as I can see, Beagle had the greatest ambition of being an integrated part of everyone's desktop environment, with a slick UI and everything. Namazu and Xapian are mainly focused on the backend, not the user experience. Strigi also seems to be a dead project. And Pinot looks promising but also appears to be one of those one-guy projects where the developer's continuing interest in the project may be a concern.

Edit: Missed a big one! There's also Tracker — yum install tracker-search-tool. This seems to be under active development as part of the Gnome project, which is very promising. While it's designed to be desktop-environment-neutral, I'm not finding a current KDE front-end.

So, there you go. Depending on how satisfying that is, the answer to your question is either "yes" or "no". :)

Answer 2

krunner, does a nice job in KDE. The ubuntu unity search bar is definitely the closest thing on linux to spotlight though...