Tracker is new indexing search tool integrated into Ubuntu 7.10 enabled as default. Touted as superior over it’s competition, “Beagle” (which relies on Mono and C#). Beagle reliance on Mono make it a bit of a memory hog, but about the same levels as Vista’s Instant Search or Spotlight. Thus it was never installed as default on Ubuntu, despite it’s stability. Enters Tracker:
Tracker is a competing solution that strives to be efficient, and is designed for low-memory systems, written in C. It blazes through PDFs that Beagle struggle with. Even during indexing, it only takes up about 5-10MB. While it is rather new, immature, with a hint of instability, those damn pesky bugs can’t possibly hit me, right? With the Ubuntu dev team doing a good job integrating into the OS, life is great? Right?Or so i thought (again). The Emptiness For all its worth, Tracker did work for the first day. Happily indexing away, with search results instantly showing up. Until Day 2, when this starts happening:
Figure 1: Tracker in deep shit.Using the ‘tracker -stats’ command line, the indexer seems to be working. But the search results just aren’t showing up. Well, this is an open source application. Surely there is a bug fix on Launchpad right? NOT! So after 2 hours of digging through bug reports and Googling, the general solution proposed is simply force Tracker to reindex everything and start praying with the Ubuntu CD in my hand. I reluctantly typed into a terminal window:
terence@terence-laptop:~$ trackerd –reindex
This was followed by two hours of meaningless terminal output:
Figure 2: A window of “tracker-ese’.Two hours of immeasurable frustration, a miracle occurred:
Figure 3: Tracker nursed back to health.
P.S. I would like to apologize for the possibly inconsistent font. I still haven’t figure out how to do complex formatting properly in Blogger.
