Re: [Expert] Is the kat dead?

[Saku Aura]

Scott Newton wrote:

On Friday 25 August 2006 23:20, John Layt wrote:
  

In its place you may have to look to the Gnome world and their Beagle, for
which you can get a KDE front-end called Kerry.  This is pushed by Suse,
Red Hat and Ubuntu, so it has more liklihood of surviving, but be warned it
uses Mono/C# if you have political objections to anthing M$ related.
    

Strigi is another one to watch:
http://www.vandenoever.info/software/strigi/

  

One that works for me at the moment is Recoll http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/. For some reason it almost never gets mentioned. Unlike Kat or Beagle, it seems to do what it promises (it promises slightly less, read on). At least my experience with Beagle has been that the daemon hangs quite often and is a pain to kill manually (pkill -9 mono, pkill -9 beagled).

Some thoughts on Recoll:
+ Mandriva RPM is available
+ It indexes Thunderbird mailboxes and opens emails in a preview window. You'll need to open Thunderbid manually and find the message if you'd like to (say) reply to them, but it is much easier when you know the date, sender and the folder. I think there are some issues with emails still currently at IMAP folders (as oppose to saved at local folders), but they might have been fixed (I don't have access to my Mandriva box right now).
+ At least in my personal experience it is very stable and fast (unlike regular Thunderbird search).
- It is not as fancy as Kat or Beagle promise to be. The indexer does not run in real time, instead it is a program that can be run with (say) overnight cron-job. For me this is not an issue, I don't need a desktop search to find out emails that I just typed, but the ones from three years ago are harder to find.
- The index file can be huge. My index file for my emails alone (about 800megs of emails) is about 500megs. Given the price of disk space this is for me a non-issue.

Best,

Saku