Trackers: integrate tags into the document search

Tracker is emerging as a dangerous rival as the Beagle search solution to 'inside of our files. From his side the best performance and less load on the system.

We see quickly how to install it on Ubuntu Edgy Nautilus and how to integrate the possibility to label our documents. Through Deskbar so we can not only search by name and / or the contents of a file, but also on the basis of labels (tags) defined by us.

Installing tracker

Put into our repositories those related to tracker

  edgy main deb http://debs.michaelbiebl.de/
 http://debs.michaelbiebl.de/ edgy main deb-src 

Personally I prefer to avoid creating a single very long sources.list. Using the `list` you can have a more rational management of repositories.
Simply create the file / etc / apt / sources.list.d / tracker.list and insert inside the repositories for inclusion in APT's database.

Now get the signature of 'archive and let's recognize that APT

  $ Wget http://www.michaelbiebl.de/biebl.asc
 $ Sudo apt-key add biebl.asc 

We update the database with apt-get update and install these packages:

  $ Sudo apt-get install tracker-utils tracker-tracker libdeskbar tracker-search-tool 

Now we run the tracker:

  & $ Trackerd 

and put this in our programs to start with gnome session.

Integration of tracker with Deskbar

It is very useful to use the tracker to make our research directly from the 'Deskbar applet. Going in the preferences of the items we select Deskbar Search for files using `Tracker` and `Search Tool Search for files using tracker (live result)`.

Enter tags via nautilus

Tracker is also able to search on labels that we attach to each file. You can handle these tags very easily through Nautilus (the Gnome file manager), due to a Python script.

First we need to install support for python nautilus:

  $ Sudo apt-get install python-nautilus
 $ Nautilus-q 

Now we download the script tracker-tags directly from Gnome CVS.

We create the folder that contains the python scripts to Nautilus and copy inside the script:

  $ Mkdir ~ / .nautilus / python-extensions
 $ Mv-tracker-tags tab.py ~ / .nautilus / python-extensions
 $ Nautilus-q 

You will notice that now by clicking on a file's properties to 'appeared inside the Nautilus is a new tab named `Tags`. We can use it to manage the tags that we want to use for each file or directory.

Now we can use Tracker to search all 'internal tags and not just the canonical name or in the metadata of the files! Here is an example of what you can do: