Beagle Newsletter 21 June 2005

[Joe Gasiorek <joe gasiorek gmail com>]

Beagle Newsletter - 21 June 2005

Welcome to another edition of the Beagle Newsletter. If you're new to
the project you can read up about it on our website:
http://www.gnome.org/projects/beagle

Releases
-----

Beagle

  Beagle is now at version 0.0.11.1 which is by far the best Beagle
  ever.  The latest release included such improvements as a new
  web-services interface, a new configuration system and tons of
  locking fixes.

Inotify

  Robert Love has released version 0.23 of his Inotify kernel patch.
  This version is required if you want inotify support in both the 0.0.11.1
  release and CVS versions of Beagle.

GMime

   GMime 2.1.15 is now required for mail support in Beagle.  Joe Shaw
   has landed this change to coincide with the updated filtering code.
   The updated filtering code now has the ability to do such things as
   index mail attachments.

Mono

   Mono version 1.1.18 is out and is recommended to get the most
   out of Beagle.  The updated IO layer that was introduced in
   version 1.1.17 has reportedly made Beagle 2-3 times faster
   when indexing.  Version 1.0.6 is the only version of Mono that
   works with Beagle from the 1.0 branch.


Project
----

New Wiki

   With much help from the community, Joe Shaw has move the
   Beagle Wiki off of its former server running phpwiki to a new
   one running MediaWiki.  MediaWiki supports many things,
   such as discussion pages in which many members of the
   community have already taken advantage of.  Thanks Western
   Michigan University Computer Club for hosting the wiki for so long.

FreeBSD Port

   Jean-Yves Lefort has started a porting effort to bring Beagle to
   FreeBSD.  There are sure to be many more fixes needed while
   development has by no means slowed down, but this effort should
   help others looking to use Beagle on different operating systems.

Packages

   Beagle is now being packaged for a few different Linux
   distributions.  SUSE, Ubuntu, and Foresight each have packages
   which users can quickly install.  Many community members are
   creating packages for other distributions such as Fedora Core.

Localization

   Beagle now has localization support which many people have
   already taken advantage of.  Even if you're new to the GNOME
   Translation Project, please look into translating Beagle to your
   language.


Hacking
----

Configuration System

   Daniel Drake has created a new configuration system for Beagle.
   You can currently use the beagle-config tool to do cool things like
   have Beagle index more than just your home directory.  As a result,
   Beagle does not use .noindex files anymore, so a beagle-settings
   GUI configuration utility has been worked on by Fredrik Hedberg.

No D-BUS

   Beagle now does not use D-BUS for message passing.  This greatly
   reduces the pain of installing Beagle seeing as how only certain
   versions of D-BUS worked with Beagle.  So if you have had trouble
   installing Beagle in the past, give the current release a try.

System Daemon

   There is work being done to create a system wide indexing process
   that would keep track of things like man pages, application launchers,
   icons and help documentation that are common to all users on the
   system.  This way each user does not have to have that information
   indexed separately.

New Filters

   Along with the new ability for filters to themselves create Indexables
   new Filters for Chm, Matlab, Scilab and many programming languages
   have been added to Beagle.

Web Services

   Vijay has created a new networked mode of Beagle based on the
   improved web services interface.  You can read all about how to set
   up Beagle this way on the wiki:
   http://beaglewiki.org/NetworkedBeagleSetup

As always if you have any input to how the next Beagle Newsletter
should be distributed or what should go in it please email Joe
Gasiorek at joe gasiorek gmail com