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# Beagle

From ArchWiki

Beagle is a desktop search daemon, similar to Spotlight on Mac OS X.

Note: Beagle does not appear to be in active development anymore.

## Prerequisites

### Enabling extended file attributes

By default the Arch kernel has extended file attributes build in, if you have built your own make sure you have it enabled in your kernel:

     File Systems -->
      <*> Second extended fs support
       [*]   Ext2 extended attributes

      <*> Ext3 journalling file system support
       [*]   Ext3 extended attributes

      <*> Reiserfs support
       [*]   ReiserFS extended attributes

You then need to mount the file system you wish to index with the user_xattr option, to do this add it after `'defaults'` in your `/etc/fstab`, so you end up with something like this:

     /dev/sda2 / ext4 defaults,user_xattr 0 1

To use Beagle without restarting you can remount the filesystem with this option:

     # mount -o remount,user_xattr /

### Increasing inotify value

Beagle uses the inotify subsystem of Linux in order to watch files for changes. This enables Beagle to be notified of changes to files and directories instead of having to rescan the filesystem.

By default the maximum number of watches is set to 8192, which is rather low. Increasing this value will have no noticeable side effects, so you can safely increase it. You can do this by adding the following to `/etc/sysctl.conf`:

     fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 65536

Note: From version 207, systemd only applies settings from `/etc/sysctl.d/*` and `/usr/lib/sysctl.d/*`. In this case, you should add the previous line to something like `/etc/sysctl.d/99-inotify.conf`.

This will take effect from the next reboot, however you can change it right away by issuing the following command:

     # echo 65536 > /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches

## Installation

Beagle is available from the [extra] repository. It depends on Mono, so if you do not already have this installed there may be a lot of packages to download.

     # pacman -S beagle

By default it comes with a GNOME GUI, which has a lot of GNOME dependencies. If you do not want these there is a version (beagle-no-gnome) in the AUR which does not include this. If you are using KDE there are various GUIs available, including KBeagleBar and Kerry.

## Configuration

Beagle will by default index your home directory, you can test that by running the following command:

     $ beagled --debug --fg

After a few moments you should start to see your files being indexed. After this press Ctrl+C to quit. Run the command again without arguments, and it will start as a daemon.

     $ beagled

If you wish to exclude directories or change advanced settings, launch the Beagle settings tool:

     $ beagle-settings

## Autostart

To autostart the daemon just setup your desktop environment to run the last command on startup.

GNOME users can do this by clicking on the Desktop menu, going to Preferences, then Sessions. In the Sessions dialog, choose the Startup Programs tab, and add an entry which executes beagled.

## Searching

Under GNOME you can press the F12 key (unless you changed it) to launch the search GUI. Under other desktop environments you need to run the following command (or setup a hotkey):

     $ beagle-search

Retrieved from "https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Beagle&oldid=276771"
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