Re: [Tracker] Running tracker on an Ubuntu server box?

[Ivan Frade <ivan frade gmail com>]

Hi!

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 10:14 PM, tigerf <tigerf web de> wrote:

Daniel Bo schrieb:
> On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 12:30 AM, tigerf <tigerf web de> wrote:
Thx! I just set up an Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop and tried these. Behaved as
expected, exactily what I need, ...but running on the server OS.

So I installed tracker on my server edition using "apt-get install
tracker" (what led to 141 MB of all kinds of new stuff, btw).

 In your case, i would recommend to take the last release (0.6.93), untar, and compile disabling all the UI tools (--disable-trackerapplet, and so on).

 For instance, add these flags when run autogen.sh
        --disable-deskbar-applet                \
        --disable-tracker-applet                \
        --disable-tracker-preferences           \
        --disable-tracker-search-tool           \
        --disable-libtrackergtk                 \
        --enable-external-sqlite                \
        --enable-poppler-glib                   \
        --disable-unit-tests                    \

And optionally these (if you are not indexing images at all):
        --disable-imagemagick                   \
        --disable-unac                          \
        --disable-gstreamer-helix               \
        --disable-libexif                        \
        --disable-libtiff                        \
        --disable-libjpeg                        \
        --enable-exempi                         \

And take a look to this option. It enables/disables to uncompres ps.gz files to index the content (can be relevant for you).
        --enable-unzip-ps-gz-files=no

My first attempt to start the tracker daemon with "trackerd" resulted in

"DBUS ERROR: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Spawn.ExecFailed occurred with
message dbus-launch failed to autolaunch D-Bus session: Autolaunch
error: X11 initialization failed.

ERROR: could not get the dbus session bus - exiting"

what makes sense to me, since my server has no GUI, X11 etc and thus no
dbus. Resolving this is beyond my knowledge, I fear.

I guess it is a problem between dbus, X11, the relation between them (if any) and how the session is started. Trackerd itself doesn't require anything graphic to run. There were other people in the mailing list trying tracker in a server/client configuration. Not sure if their server had the X system up and running, but maybe they can help here.

If it is not possible to start tracker without X, open a bug. It is definetely something that tracker should be able to do.
 

May be it is no good idea to try to wrestle tracker into a GUIless
server ubuntu edition. Looks like nobody tried this before.

 Yes, you are opening a new way! :) Isn't it exciting?
 

Just thinking loud here:
When developping such a mighty and  modular tool, why limiting yourself
to GUIified OSes?

For example, an Apache module based on tracker delivering links to all
kinds of ressources residing on this server could be a very useful NAS
application right out of the box. Kind of "Google for the masses", if
you like ;)
May be I'm just missing the point.

 That would be even a great idea for a GSOC project! (though too late for this year). I think it is a) feasable b) a great idea, now we only need a brave hacker to work on that!

 Take also into account that for tracker 0.7.x we will change dramatically the API. I would implement that directly in the new API.
 

Thanks to all

 Very welcome, nice to see new ideas and use cases,

Ivan