LinLog

What with "desktop search" being one of the catch phrases this year, I've been meaning to try out Kat, a KDE-based desktop search tool. I finally got around to it tonight.

The reason I never bothered to try Kat up until now is that I used to use Slackware. Kat depends on inotify, which is a relatively recent kernel feature. So, to make Kat work on Slackware, I would have had to upgrade my kernel, which was, frankly, just too much work. However, now I'm running Kubuntu Breezy, which has an inotify-enabled kernel and pre-buitl Kat package. So, I installed it.

When you start Kat for the first time, it takes you through a setup wizard. This wizard checks that inotify is working, starts the Kat daemon, and checks for the various helper applications that Kat needs to extract data from various file formats. There are over a dozen helper programs listed, and while I only had two installed initially, all but one of them is in an Ubuntu repository.

Step 4 of the setup wizard guides you through. Or rather, that's what it says on the screen. In fact, it just dumped me at Kat's main screen and that was it. Apparently creating a catalog is pretty self-explanatory, because the Kat homepage didn't have any documentation on it either. I didn't really know what to do, so I just gave the catalog a name, my home directory (for the location to index?) and told it to auto-update, whatever that means.

At this point, I'm not really sure if this was a good idea. The Kat daemon which is, apparently, a KDE service that handles the file indexing, seems really dodgy. I'm not sure how it works, but it keeps stopping for no apparent reason and I now have two icons for it in my system tray. It also took me about three tries before it actually indexed any files. And when it did start working, it gave me this ominous looking progress bar that never got above 1%, along with an 11 hour time estimate and a box that refered to a file size of 719MB, which I fear may refer to the index size.

What little I've seen so far suggests that Kat might be marginally useful, if it ever finishes indexing my files. Perhaps it just needs some time to mature. I guess I'll know more in a day or two, when it's finished indexing enough files to be useful.