Google Desktop Now on Linux 293
mytrip writes "Google was set to launch late on Wednesday a beta version of Google Desktop search for Linux in a sign of encouragement by the search giant for Linux on the desktop.
Google Desktop allows people to search the Web while also searching the full text of all the information on their computer, including Gmail and their Web search history. Because the index is stored locally on the computer, users can access Gmail and Web history while offline."
Here's the link. (Score:5, Informative)
Beagle (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Beagle (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Spousal Abuse (Score:5, Informative)
Google Desktop has been available for Mac OS X since April.
Re:slocate? (Score:5, Informative)
it does (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Privacy (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah but even then, that's when the beauty of Linux kicks in. If someone discovers, for example, a buffer overflow in the app, they're still facing an unknown kernel version, distro filesystem, and GCC version on top of Linux's user privileges. It's much harder to create an exploit that could be used to take over your account, let alone take control of the system. There's really no wide reaching baseline from which to build an attack on Linux, unlike Windows which has one distro, one compiler. The best they could do on a broad reaching basis is crash the application consistently or maybe corrupt the binary to delete files from your home directory if you install the application locally.
Re:Beagle (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This delay has been good (Score:2, Informative)
I am now testing GDLinux and it feels much more sane and does not contain wine nor mono which I am quite happy with.
Re:slocate? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, it is open source.
Re:Beagle (Score:5, Informative)
This means that just as the existing programs are starting to come to terms, Google comes and returns the chaos on the desktop search scene. While I like Google internet search, their desktop offering has me feeling eerie. I would prefer using Mono over Googles closed source program. But even better is the ultra-efficient Strigi [sf.net] which will be part of KDE4 and indexes streams instead of files.
Re:This delay has been good (Score:2, Informative)
Beagle has. http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/18
Did you actually go and search for it? Thirty seconds ago, this http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=beagle [slashdot.org] gave me the above article as the fourth result. It daes from Jan 2006 and I remember it making the frontpage (or at least my RSS feed).
No-one? You really don't read Slashdot often do you?
I assumed the reason this made it to
Re:Privacy (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Privacy (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Spousal Abuse (Score:3, Informative)
There's a developer in the group that says they are working on it, but it's been like this for quite some time - so it shows that Google's linux support is only token support at best. If they had Linux support they'd use a cross playform development process rather than porting wine to support their apps.
Re:How does it run? (Score:4, Informative)
The article says it was "developed natively." So this is definitely not the win.exe version wrapped in Wine?
Nope. Runs for real, native stuff as far as I can tell. And, I might add, it runs in more than gnome and KDE as claimed - it parked in fluxbox right in the tray like a good boy. The RPM even converted to a Slack package just fine.
It hasn't indexed yet even though I've told it to, but I think it's waiting for idle time on my machine and I'm killing it this morning.
Re:Obsession with search (Score:4, Informative)
You know, I used to feel this exact same way. Even after I upgraded to Tiger I hardly ever touched the Spotlight menu, and only really used it in Mail.app where I did occasionally need a bit of help digging for some random nugget in the last couple of years worth of email archives.
Then one day about a year ago, I decided to give it a try. I think it was because I was working on a very large number of projects at the time and each project was complicated enough that they had their own nested folder structures, and while I could find everything, having to drill down into the folders was getting a bit tedious. I also have a decent number of applications installed, not a ton mind you, but a pretty decent amount, and digging through the apps folder for the utility I don't use often enough to pollute my dock with was also getting tedious.
So I tried Spotlight to see if it might make things better. I really expected to think it was stupid and go back to the status quo. What I found was that in many cases, while Spotlight was not perfect, and occasionally it was actually slower depending on what the computer was thinking about at the time, it was definitely more convenient. I use it all the time now. I still save all my documents in an intelligent folder structure with descriptive names (both for folders and for filenames), however when I need to find a manual or spec sheet for something, I type the name into Spotlight and look at the PDF results. Need to launch Cyberduck (the FTP client I use), type it in Spotlight and hit the key command to launch the first item (Applications appear at the top of the list).
Of course these desktop search programs are not for everyone. It may not work for you. However, don't knock it till you have really tried it. I don't mean try it for one search this afternoon then just dismiss it. Give it a week or two and really use it during that time. Maybe it won't work for you, but that doesn't automatically mean that the people it does work for are doing something wrong, they just use available tools in a different way.
Who cares.. (Score:3, Informative)
If GTalk was released for Ubuntu it would be the killer app to have since everyone is restricted to using Skype. I would even pay for a fully working GTalk on Linux.
Re:Beagle - installed wrong? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Privacy (Score:1, Informative)
All cryptography is security through obscurity. Security can also be based on capabilities and tokens that have nothing to do with secrets. You can't replicate the obscure information of something you don't have.
Re:Privacy (Score:3, Informative)
That would be insecurity through obscurity.