Comments on: What is trackerd and Why Is It Running?

By: Andrew P.

Andrew P. — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:02:30 +0000

Tracker is half-baked and broken, at least in my experience with Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) and Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). It slows down the machine and I’ve never seen it find anything. Canonical may have been including it in the distributions in a forlorn hope that the creators of Tracker will fix it real soon, but little progress has been made to that end in the last two years. Short of removing it, it’s best to disable it through the Main Menu:

System > Preferences > Sessions

Uncheck “Tracker” and “Tracker Applet”. It won’t be loaded the next time you log in. Use Places > Search for Files… from the Main Menu instead.

By: ykanello

ykanello — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 10:25:41 +0000

I just removed. I wanted first to see if it will break anything in the ubuntu-desktop setup but all went nice. I removed it because I don’t use it, (either locate or find does the job for me) plus even when tuned down it runs only on one core, and gets the system out of powersave mode, so the fans kick in even when its idle.

By: mark

mark — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 05:26:16 +0000

always wonder what people use these things for, just organize your files in some rational manor and use version control for anything important, maybe its just me but between using svn for all code/design/office documents and reasonable organization for everything else i have 9TB of data on my workstation and never need to search for anything

By: Lorn

Lorn — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 13:52:46 +0000

No, don’t use it, and don’t need it, and or the system resources it uses.

put this function in your .bashrc file.

# finds a filename recursively and case insensitively from the current directory.
# you can change ‘ff’ to any alias you want that’s not used.
# ex: ff readme
function ff() { find . -iname ‘*’$1′*’ ; }

By: Fab

Fab — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 04:18:34 +0000

I use Pinot, either with the stand-alone UI or through Deskbar. It also has a command-line based front-end.

By: Drake Justice

Drake Justice — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:48:33 +0000

excellent article… all new ubuntu tweakers need to read this.

By: shnoofy

shnoofy — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:59:48 +0000

I don’t need searchtools because I know where my files are located. A searchengine would be useful in private library software for books and multimedia, but desktopsearch is extreamly useless to me.

By: Zac

Zac — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 04:21:22 +0000

I use tracker sometimes. It does an index 45sec after startup, which is quick depending on how much changes you did the previous session. I just turned off indexing Evolution email, as I use mostly gmail now with prism and checkmail. Mainly use tracker to search for documents. I have had no problems with tracker at all, search results are very quick. I also, because of mono prefer tracker over beagle but is tracker getting constantly improved? Beagle is supported by Novell so it probably gets better funding?(Ubuntu 8.04)

By: bigbert

bigbert — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 02:34:08 +0000

Note: the ‘find’ and ‘locate’ commands are just for FILENAMES. Tracker searches the CONTENTS of files as well. Very useful if you want to find all the documents where Joe Soap is mentioned. It also searches Evolution emails.

Also note the ‘catfish’ is a very nice & useful front-end for tracker, available in the repo’s.

Don’t use Beagle – it needs the Mono framework. I don’t trust Mono, because it is based on the Microsoft .NET framework. Who knows when / if MS will decide to sue people using it.

I do agree that tracker can chew CPU, but this is just initially (to build a database) and there after when you copy a file to your HDD. Give it time; after a month or so it will settle down.

I agree that recoll is cool; if you want to unintstall tracker and install recoll + Xapian, go for it.

By: SilverWave

SilverWave — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 22:00:22 +0000

Catfish is a great front end for “find” or “locate”
I absolutely detest tracker and beagle first thing I do is uninstall!
Recoll has a much better search interface and it works. i.e it actual will find what you are looking for
For search and replace try the “regexxer Search Tool”