Beagle/Best on Ubuntu - experiences

[Victor Hooi <victorhooi yahoo com>]

Hi,

I compiled Beagle as per the instructsion on ubuntuwiki.org, and I think 
it looks great - kudos to the developers. However, for me at least, it 
seems buggy as heck...*sigh*. Anyway, following are a couple of issue 
(numbered for clarity - apologies for the length of this message, but I 
thought'd I'd better include everything that might be helpful, and I 
don't know enough to know what to omit):

1. For some weird reason, 'Best' crashes whenever you click open. Below 
is the terminal output.

victorhooi CPE-138-130-173-50:~ $ best
Rendering
Done Rendering: 1.65s
Rendering
Done Rendering: .32s
Rendering
Done Rendering: .53s
Open URI: action:_tile_3!Open
Cmd: gedit
Arg: 'file:///home/victorhooi/theep - gaim log'
Error in OpenFromMime: System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: Cannot find 
the specified file
in [0x0027d] (at 
/build/buildd/mcs-1.0.1/class/System/System.Diagnostics/Process.cs:801) 
System.Diagnostics.Process:Start_common 
(System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo,System.Diagnostics.Process)
in [0x00007] (at 
/build/buildd/mcs-1.0.1/class/System/System.Diagnostics/Process.cs:834) 
System.Diagnostics.Process:Start ()
in <0x0005d> (wrapper remoting-invoke-with-check) 
System.Diagnostics.Process:Start ()
in [0x000be] (at /home/victorhooi/cvs/beagle/Tiles/Tile.cs:175) 
Beagle.Tile.Tile:OpenFromMime (Beagle.Hit,string,bool)


Unhandled Exception: System.InvalidCastException: Cannot cast from 
source type to destination type.
in <0x0021d> GeckoSharp.intObjectstringSignal:intObjectstringCallback 
(intptr,string,int)
in <0x00079> (wrapper native-to-managed) 
GeckoSharp.intObjectstringSignal:intObjectstringCallback (intptr,intptr,int)
in (unmanaged) (wrapper managed-to-native) Gtk.Application:gtk_main ()
in <0x00004> (wrapper managed-to-native) Gtk.Application:gtk_main ()
in <0x00007> Gtk.Application:Run ()
in <0x00007> Gnome.Program:Run ()
in [0x00068] (at /home/victorhooi/cvs/beagle/Best/Best.cs:88) 
Best.Best:Main (string[])

free(): invalid pointer 0x8657000!

2. Should 'beagled' be run as root, or as your normal user? At first, I 
assumed user, but this doesn't seem to work very well. When you attempt 
to run it as user (commandline: beagled --fg --out), it spits out 
messages like the following

WARN: Couldn't set extended attribute on /home/victorhooi

and then repeats this for every file/folder eg

WARN: Couldn't set extended attribute on 
/home/victorhooi/web_photo_gallery/original/www/zip.png

along with some error messages

WARN: Caught exception in post_hook of task group 'crawl 
/home/victorhooi/web_photo_gallery/original'
WARN: System.Exception: Could not set extended attribute on 
/home/victorhooi/web_photo_gallery/original: Permission denied
in [0x00058] (at 
/home/victorhooi/cvs/beagle/Util/ExtendedAttribute.cs:66) 
Beagle.Util.ExtendedAttribute:Set (string,string,string)
in [0x0000e] (at 
/home/victorhooi/cvs/beagle/beagled/FileSystemQueryable/LastCrawlTime.cs:60) 
Beagle.Daemon.FileSystemQueryable.LastCrawlTime:Set (string,System.DateTime)
in [0x0000c] (at 
/home/victorhooi/cvs/beagle/beagled/FileSystemQueryable/LastCrawlTime.cs:75) 
LastCrawlTimeClosure:Set ()
in <0x00053> (wrapper delegate-invoke) 
System.MulticastDelegate:invoke_void ()
in [0x00055] (at /home/victorhooi/cvs/beagle/Util/Scheduler.cs:345) 
TaskGroupPrivate:Decrement ()

When I run it as root, with sudo beagled --fg --out, it appears to work 
fine, outputing lines like

INFO: Crawling 
/home/victorhooi/web_photo_gallery/ImageMagick-6.1.5/PerlMagick/t/reference

without any WARN lines.

3. Is there any way of getting Beagle to index ntfs partitions? From 
what I gather of this site 
(http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/ntfs/attributes/ea.html), NTFS does 
have support for EAs, so would it be possible for Beagle to index them? 
(This item is linked to 6.)

4. Running best creates the icon in the notification area - this is not 
bad, i think it's very cool =), but perhaps you could put a note in the 
README or beaglewiki about this behaviour. I'm sure I'm not the only 
user to be confused to think best crashed when faced with the Rendering, 
Done Rendering in x seconds output.

5. Beagle creates a separate database for each user you run it under, 
correct? Even running under root (su), it still seems to create it for 
the user from which I su-ed. Is there any possibility of having a single 
system-wide database for all users? (Is security an issue?)

6. Is there any way of letting Beagle crawl outside the home directory? 
I read the post here 
(http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dashboard-hackers/2004-October/msg00136.html), 
and think it would make Beagle a lot more useful if it wasn't restricted 
to just your home folder. For instance, a lot of my documents are stored 
on my ntfs partitions (/media/hda1,3,5,6 for my ubuntu box), and I'm 
hoping to let Beagle run amok and index my p0rn collection on there *grin*.

7. At least for me (this is on Ubuntu - offtopic, but I found Slackware 
a *lot* easier to compile stuff under - just my observation), building 
gsf-sharp fails with:

victorhooi CPE-138-130-173-50:~/cvs/gsf-sharp $ make
Making all in gsf
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/victorhooi/cvs/gsf-sharp/gsf'
generate gsf-api.xml \
--outdir=generated --customdir=. --assembly-name=gsf-sharp && touch 
generated-stamp
/bin/sh: line 1: generate: command not found
make[1]: [generated-stamp] Error 127 (ignored)
/usr/bin/mcs --unsafe --target library /pkg:gtk-sharp \
generated/*.cs ./AssemblyInfo.cs -o gsf-sharp.dll
error CS2001: Source file `generated/*.cs' could not be found
Compilation failed: 1 error(s), 0 warnings
make[1]: *** [gsf-sharp.dll] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/victorhooi/cvs/gsf-sharp/gsf'
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
victorhooi CPE-138-130-173-50:~/cvs/gsf-sharp $


8. On the beaglewiki, they recommend using beagled with --fg and --out. 
However, --out doesn't seem to be a valid option:

Ignoring unknown argument '--out'

I should probably take this up with the wiki itself, but I just thought 
that somebody on the ML might know about it.

9. What packages are necessary to run Beagle/Best? Following the 
instructions on the ubuntuwiki, I installed a gargantum moutain of 
packages which managed to reduce my freespace from 800 Mb down to 300 MB 
(also compiling other stuff as well). Well, using synaptic I removed a 
whole slew of packages, and Best now complains about some gecko-sharp 
thingy.

Well, that's it...

Personally, I think beagle totally rocks, and even at this early stage 
it seems slicker than google-desktop (which crashes against netlimiter 
anyway) and I hope it takes off. Also, thanks to Nat for helping me out 
on #dashboard =).

Bye,
Victor