Searching for files in Nautilus

[John Lovely]

I'm a long time Mandrake junkie and have recently installed fedora core. While Fedora is fast and stable, it doesn't seem to want to do anything - anything at all.

For example - try to locate a file - in windows you open the search window, enter a search pattern eg *.doc and maybe some filters and click the start button. In Windows 95 or Me you're presented quickly with a list of files that match. (In more modern windows and Mandrake - it still works but slowly or VERY slowly)

In fedora core, the Nautilus help file says Fedora should work the same but, no matter what search variables you input the answer is always blank. It doesn't matter if you input the name of a file you know is there or whether its on a VFAT or native partition.

Its very fast, so I suspect its not actually searching.

How do you get fedora to locate a file (from the GUI) I must admit I haven't tried find or whereis in a terminal window yet.

[bryancole]

Nautilus now uses Beagle for searching, by default. However, beagle needs to have an index before it can return any search results. By default, the beagle indexing daemon is not automatically started, even if you check the "start searching & indexing service automatically" option in the search preferences (this is a bug I guess).

Go to System->Perferences->More Preferences->Session and add "beagled" to your session start-up programs. Start "beagled -bg" in a terminal and leave yourself loged in overnight, to give beagle a headstart in indexing your home dir. The next day, you should be able to find stuff using search queries . Beagled should now get started every time you log in and it indexes new documents/files almost as soon as they're created, so there's little delay between creating a document and being able to locate it by beagle-search.

I'm really impressed by beagle. Pity indexing isn't enabled out-the-box.

[saBrEwolf]

Isn't that something to do with mono and beagled being memory and CPU hogs when FC5 was first released?
I think I read that on a mailing list somewhere

Since the updates I haven't had any slowdown problems so it should be ok to have it start on startup.

My 2p

[John Lovely]

Originally Posted by bryancole

Nautilus now uses Beagle for searching, by default. However, beagle needs to have an index before it can return any search results. By default, the beagle indexing daemon is not automatically started, even if you check the "start searching & indexing service automatically" option in the search preferences (this is a bug I guess).

Go to System->Perferences->More Preferences->Session and add "beagled" to your session start-up programs. Start "beagled -bg" in a terminal and leave yourself loged in overnight, to give beagle a headstart in indexing your home dir. The next day, you should be able to find stuff using search queries . Beagled should now get started every time you log in and it indexes new documents/files almost as soon as they're created, so there's little delay between creating a document and being able to locate it by beagle-search.

I'm really impressed by beagle. Pity indexing isn't enabled out-the-box.

Thanks for the help, but this was only one of 10 problems I noticed straight away with fc5 - I've now installed "SUSe 10.Slick" and everything works fine out of the box.

Good luck with fc5 !