Topper, thanks for sharing this! I don’t use gentoo, but I’m sure someone will find this useful. :)

Here is a working ebuild for gentoo:

google-desktop-1.0.1.0060.ebuild

# Copyright 1999-2007 Gentoo Foundation
# Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2
# $Header: $
 
inherit rpm
 
MY_P="${PN}-linux-${PV}"
 
DESCRIPTION="Google desktop search"
HOMEPAGE="http://desktop.google.com/linux"
SRC_URI="http://dl.google.com/linux/rpm/stable/i386/${MY_P}.rpm"
 
LICENSE="Google"
SLOT="0"
KEYWORDS="~x86"
IUSE=""
 
DEPEND=""
RDEPEND=">=x11-libs/gtk+-2.2.0"
 
src_install() {
    cd ${WORKDIR}
    dodir /opt/google/desktop
    cp -R opt/google/desktop/* "${D}"/opt/google/desktop
    dodir /var/cache/google/desktop
    keepdir /var/cache/google/desktop
    insinto /etc/cron.hourly
    doins etc/cron.hourly/gdl-update
    dosym /opt/google/desktop/bin/gdlinux /usr/bin/gdlinux
}

I’m pretty sure I had xpdf. I was also annoyed at Beagle’s inability to properly index my Kmail email. It would index some emails (incidentally most of them from 2005) and then declare it’s done. None of the new messages were included in the index, and I couldn’t find any correspondence regarding recent issues.

So yeah, it does support more file types. But I just couldn’t get it to work, and I didn’t feel like spending inordinate amount of time to troubleshoot it. I really wanted to like Beagle. And it may still be a valid solution for some. For some reason though it just didn’t work properly on my box.

I suspect the problem you had with Beagle was with missing programs required for complete runtime processing, i.e. xpdf in the case of PDF files. See the Optional prerequisites page for more.

I would agree that getting up and running with Beagle is far from simple. That said, Beagle currently supports many more file types than Google Desktop Search for Linux. Not an easy choice.

[…] YouTube Link to Article linux Google Desktop for Linux » Posted at Terminally Incoherent on Thursday, June 28, 2007 Google Desktop for Linux June 28th, 2007 7:21 PM by Luke I got a nice surprise today … their desktop search tool on Linux. So I immediately went and downloaded a copy. I like Google Desktop Search … this is probably the first linux application that forced me to “reboot” to complete the installation. Ok, it didn’ View Entire Article » […]