Birch Street Computing -

about me

John M is a Linux fan in Lowell, MA.

I work at at a company writing software. I fool around with Free and Open Source software for fun & profit.

I was big into Last.fm and you can still see some of what I listen to there. I can also be found using github and recently sourcehut as well as bitbucket (historically). I don't care for most popular social media sites. If I have an account on one or the other it's probably either old and unused or was created just for tinkering.

promo

Links to things I like, use, or otherwise feel is worth sharing. Things I'd like to see get more popular.

Strigi eats my laptop

Oh, I really wanted to like desktop search. I really wanted to like strigi in particular. It is turned on in Kubuntu Gutsy by default.

I had to get rid of it.

On my laptop, it was running constantly - anywhere up to 93% of cpu - and using up too much disk space. First off, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to tell it what files not to index. There's no GUI in either the strigi:// kio slave or via the applet that lives in the system tray.

I installed the strigi-client package which provided a gui. A gui which didn't seem to actually do anything when I added a filter. I turns out that I could edit $HOME/.strigi/daemon.conf. (An xml file, arg.) But I had a hard time telling if the daemon was honoring my changes. Either way, it still was hogging too much resources and this is on a laptop. Since, I couldn't tolerate that kind of resource usage, I removed it - to avoid the temptation of trying to get it to work when I should be doing something better with my time. :-P

I seriously hope that it is in better shape for KDE 4, because it sounded really good in theory.

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