Beagle (software) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Desktop search

Desktop search is the name for the field of search tools which search the contents of a user's own computer files, rather than searching the Internet...

for Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

and other such modern Unix-like

Unix-like

A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification....

systems, enabling the user to search documents, chat logs, email and contact lists in a similar way to Spotlight

Spotlight (software)

Spotlight is a system-wide desktop search feature of Apple's Mac OS X operating system. Spotlight is a selection-based search system, which creates a virtual index of all items and files on the system. It is designed to allow the user to quickly locate a wide variety of items on the computer,...

in Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

, and Windows Search

Windows Search

Windows Search is an indexed desktop search platform released by Microsoft for the Windows operating system....

or Google Desktop

Google Desktop

Google Desktop is desktop search software made by Google for Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows. The program allows text searches of a user's e-mails, computer files, music, photos, chats, Web pages viewed, and other "Google Gadgets"....

(third party) under Linux

Linux

or Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

. It is not actively developed.

Beagle grew out of Dashboard, an early Mono

Mono (software)

Mono, pronounced , is a free and open source project led by Xamarin to create an Ecma standard compliant .NET-compatible set of tools including, among others, a C# compiler and a Common Language Runtime....

-based application for watching and presenting useful information from a user's computer. It is written in C# using Mono and uses a port of Lucene

Lucene

Apache Lucene is a free/open source information retrieval software library, originally created in Java by Doug Cutting. It is supported by the Apache Software Foundation and is released under the Apache Software License....

to C# called Lucene.net

Lucene.net

Lucene.Net is a port of the Lucene search engine library, written in C# and targeted at .NET Framework users. It is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 license.-External links:* *...

as its indexer. Beagle includes a Gtk#

Gtk Sharp

Gtk# is a set of .NET bindings for the GTK+ GUI toolkit and assorted GNOME libraries. The library facilitates building graphical GNOME applications using Mono or any other compliant CLR...

-based user interface, and integrates with Galago

Galago (software)

Galago is a desktop presence information framework, designed to transmit presence information between programs. This gives the Linux desktop the ability to combine numerous sources of information about people and combine them in novel ways. This is an area of rapid progress in desktop computing...

for presence information

Presence information

In computer and telecommunications networks, presence information is a status indicator that conveys ability and willingness of a potential communication partner—for example a user--to communicate...

.

Beagle was developed and maintained by Joe Shaw, with help from the open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

community. Other notable past contributors include Jon Trowbridge, Robert Love

Robert Love

Robert M. Love is an American author, speaker, Google engineer, and open source software developer.Love is best known for his contributions to the Linux kernel, with notable work including the preemptive kernel, process scheduler, kernel event layer, virtual memory subsystem, and inotify...

, Nat Friedman

Nat Friedman

Nathaniel Dourif Friedman , known as Nat, is a programmer who co-founded Ximian along with Miguel de Icaza in 1999, a company that was later bought by Novell in 2003....

, and David Camp.

Features

Beagle searches the content of documents and associated metadata. With Beagle, users can search for:

Applications
Archives (zip
ZIP (file format)
Zip is a file format used for data compression and archiving. A zip file contains one or more files that have been compressed, to reduce file size, or stored as is...

, tar
Tar (file format)
In computing, tar is both a file format and the name of a program used to handle such files...

, gzip
Gzip
Gzip is any of several software applications used for file compression and decompression. The term usually refers to the GNU Project's implementation, "gzip" standing for GNU zip. It is based on the DEFLATE algorithm, which is a combination of Lempel-Ziv and Huffman coding...

, bzip2
Bzip2
bzip2 is a free and open source implementation of the Burrows–Wheeler algorithm. It is developed and maintained by Julian Seward. Seward made the first public release of bzip2, version 0.15, in July 1996.-Compression efficiency:...

) and their contents
Conversations (Pidgin
Pidgin (software)
Pidgin is an open-source multi-platform instant messaging client, based on a library named libpurple. Libpurple has support for many commonly used instant messaging protocols, allowing the user to log into various services from one application.The number of Pidgin users was estimated to be over 3...

, Kopete
Kopete
Kopete is a multi-protocol, free software instant messaging client. Although it can run in numerous environments, it was designed for and integrates with the KDE desktop environment...

and IRC logs)
Documents (AbiWord
AbiWord
AbiWord is a free and open source software word processor. It was originally started by SourceGear Corporation as the first part of a proposed AbiSuite. Development stopped when SourceGear changed their focus to Internet appliances. AbiWord was adopted by some open source developers and AbiWord...

, OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org, commonly known as OOo or OpenOffice, is an open-source application suite whose main components are for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, and databases. OpenOffice is available for a number of different computer operating systems, is distributed as free software...

, Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office is a non-free commercial office suite of inter-related desktop applications, servers and services for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, introduced by Microsoft in August 1, 1989. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of...

, pdf
Portable Document Format
Portable Document Format is an open standard for document exchange. This file format, created by Adobe Systems in 1993, is used for representing documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems....

, txt, rtf
Rich Text Format
The Rich Text Format is a proprietary document file format with published specification developed by Microsoft Corporation since 1987 for Microsoft products and for cross-platform document interchange....

, html
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

)
Email
Email
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

s and Address Book contacts (from Evolution
Novell Evolution
Evolution or Novell Evolution is the official personal information manager and workgroup information management tool for GNOME. It combines e-mail, calendar, address book, and task list management functions. It has been an official part of GNOME since version 2.8 in September 2004...

, Mozilla Thunderbird
Mozilla Thunderbird
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The project strategy is modeled after Mozilla Firefox, a project aimed at creating a web browser...

(header info only), and KMail)
Help files (Texinfo
Texinfo
Texinfo is a typesetting syntax used for generating documentation in both on-line and printed form with a single source file...

, man pages)
Images (png, jpg
JPEG
In computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....

, tiff, gif
GIF
The Graphics Interchange Format is a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability....

, svg)
Music files (mp3
MP3
MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

, ogg
Ogg
Ogg is a free, open container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The creators of the Ogg format state that it is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high quality digital multimedia.The Ogg container format can multiplex...

, flac
FLAC
FLAC is a codec which allows digital audio to be losslessly compressed such that file size is reduced without any information being lost...

)
Notes taken in Tomboy
Tomboy (software)
Tomboy is a free and open-source desktop notetaking application written for Unix-like and Microsoft Windows operating systems, written in C# using Gtk#. Tomboy is part of the GNOME desktop environment, often for personal information management. Its interface is a notepad with a wiki-like linking...

, KNotes, and Labyrinth
RSS
RSS (file format)
RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format...

feeds (via Blam or Akregator)
Source code
Source code
In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...

(C
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

, C++
C++
C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

, C#, Fortran
Fortran
Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...

, Java
Java (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

, JavaScript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....

, Pascal
Pascal (programming language)
Pascal is an influential imperative and procedural programming language, designed in 1968/9 and published in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring.A derivative known as Object Pascal...

, Perl
Perl
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...

, PHP
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

, Python
Python (programming language)
Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...

, and more)
Video files (through MPlayer
MPlayer
MPlayer is a free and open source media player. The program is available for all major operating systems, including Linux and other Unix-like systems, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Versions for OS/2, Syllable, AmigaOS and MorphOS are also available. The Windows version works, with some minor...

or Totem
Totem (media player)
Totem is a media player for the GNOME computer desktop environment which runs on GNU/Linux, Solaris, BSD and other Unix and Unix-like systems. It is officially included in GNOME starting from version 2.10 , but de facto it was already included in most GNOME environments...

)
Web history (Firefox, Konqueror
Konqueror
Not to be confused with the Conqueror web browser.Konqueror is a web browser and file manager that provides file-viewer functionality for file systems such as local files, files on a remote ftp server and files in a disk image. It is a core part of the KDE desktop environment...

, Epiphany
Epiphany (web browser)
Epiphany is an open source web browser for the GNOME desktop environment. The browser is a descendant of Galeon, and was created after developer disagreements about Galeon's growing complexity...

)

Beagle can also index additional file types not natively supported using external tools through a configuration file.

Beagle instantly push indexes documents on Linux systems equipped with inotify

Inotify

inotify is a Linux kernel subsystem that acts to extend filesystems to notice changes to the filesystem, and report those changes to applications. It replaces an earlier facility, dnotify, which had similar goals....

External links

Beagle homepage and wiki (was - now parked domain)
Planet Beagle
Nat's flash demos of Beagle
Peagle-Project (PHP-Based Web-Frontend for Beagle)
Beagle++ - a NEPOMUK
NEPOMUK (framework)
NEPOMUK is an open-source software specification that is concerned with the development of a social semantic desktop that enriches and interconnects data from different desktop applications using semantic metadata stored as RDF...

-based extension of Beagle for semantic desktop
Semantic desktop
In computer science, the Semantic Desktop is a collective term for ideas related to changing a computer's user interface and data handling capabilities so that data is more easily shared between different applications or tasks and so that data that once could not be automatically processed by a...

search

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Features

See also

External links