Index and Search your files with Tracker

Tracker is an efficient, lightweight, search tool and indexer. It trawls through your hard drive to index existing files and data stores so that they could easily be found.
Tracker is an object database, these objects can also have extensible user defined metadata and tags to create rich first class objects.

Tracker does on your disk what Google does on Internet. To find a file it is enough to remember the something the file’s metadata contains.

Installing Tracker on Debian based distros is very easy, cause it is present in the repositories. sudo apt-get install tracker . For other distro you could use the source code.

tar xvzf tracker-x.y.z.tar.gz
cd tracker-x.y.z
./configure –prefix=/usr –sysconfdir=/etc
make
sudo make install

But using the source code might cause problems with dependencies like libgmime and others. So try to install it from the repositories. e.g. yum install tracker, urpmi tracker, emerge tracker.

At first start-up Tracker needs to get all your files indexed. Do this with the command

trackerd

If you want it to work in the background then do

trackerd &

More files you have more time it will take to index your files (just for the first time), from there hence trackerd would simply update its index.

After indexing you can run tracker for the terminal using tracker-search-tool.This will bring up the Tracker graphic interface. If you prefer the command-line then do tracker-search. You might need to install it.

sudo apt-get install tracker-utils

.

You might also want to configure it to suite your own needs. From the command-line do

tracker-preferences

to pop-up the Tracker Preferences window. There you can fasten/slower indexing, add extra memory to Tracker, include additional paths to index and more.

If Canonical Ltddecided in getting Tracker as a pre-installed in Ubuntu 7.10, then, there should be a reason.