All of this comes in a tiny panel applet that is simple to install and simple to use. How easy is Deskbar to install and use? Let’s find out…

Getting and installing

The Deskbar applet will be found in your distributions’ repositories most likely. So all you will have to do is either fire up your Add/Remove software utility or a terminal window. If you opt for the GUI tool you will install like so:

1. Open up the Add/Remove software utility (such as Synaptic or gpk-application).
2. Search for “deskbar-applet” (no quotes).
3. Select the resulting deskbar-applet entry.
4. Click Apply to install.

If you opt for the command line you can open up a terminal window and enter a command such as:

apt-get install deskbar-applet

or

yum install deskbar-applet

You will see no visible sign that Deskbar has been installed because you hav to add it to your panel.

Adding Deskbar to your panel

Figure 1

If you right click your GNOME panel a menu will open contining the entry “Add To Panel”. Selecting that menu entry will open up the Add To Panel window where you will select the Deskbar entry and click the Add button. When the Deskbar applet is added you will see the icon as shown in Figure 1 (the panel icon on the far right.)

Configuring Deskbar

There isn’t too many options to configure with Deskbar. The most important options will be to enable the various plugins you want to use as well as add your Twitter username/password (should you want to use Deskbar to post to Twitter.) To do this right click the Deskbar icon and select Preferences from the menu.

Figure 2

From the Preferences window you will see three tabs and a few buttons (see Figure 2). The first thing you will want to do is scroll through the list of Extensions and decide if you want to enable or disable any of them. To enable an Extension just click the checkbox so the checkmark appears. To disable an Extension click the checkbox so the checkmark disappears.

You can also move an Extension up or down the list so that a particular extension gets priority for searching or action. And finally you can configure an extension by selecting it and click the More button. For example, in order to configure your username/password for Twitter you will need to select the Twitter extension and press the More button. In this new window you will enter the credentials for your Twitter account. The More button only appears on Extensions that have configurable options.

Using Deskbar

Figure 3

This is where it gets simple. Say I want to search my machine for the sting “linux”. Click on the Desbar icon and the text area will open up for you to enter your search. As you enter your search string the Deskbar window will expand to reveal various options (see Figure 3.)

As you can see there are a number of options available:

• I can execute a command
• Search for “linux” with Beagle
• Lookup “linux” in my dictionary
• Post “linux” on Twitter.

Depending upon what Extensions I have enabled there will be more or less entries.

Final thoughts

Deskbar will quickly become your best friend on your GNOME desktop. Making use of this handy app will help to make your desktop life much more effient and simpler. My only hopes is that other desktops (such as Enlightenment) will follow suit and create simillar apps.

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Catfish is a simple graphical interface that works with any search tool you have installed. And if you have multiple search tools installed, you can have your choice of which tool to use for the search. Let’s take a look at this very handy search tool.

Getting and installing

The easiest means of installing Catfish is to open up the Add/Remove Software utility, do a search for “catfish” (no quotes), select the results, and click Apply. If you’d rather install via command line you can do so with a command like:

sudo apt-get install catfish

or

yum install catfish

The installation command you use will depend upon the distribution you use.

To start Catfish you will find an entry for it in your desktop menu. For example, in Enlightenment E17 that entry is in Accessories. You can also open the Run command (again depending upon your distribution) issue the command catfish (this can also be done from the command line.)

Figure 1

When Catfish opens you will see what should be a very user-friendly interface broken into two panes (see Figure 1). The left pane is where you enter all of your search options and the right pane is where your search results will appear.

You may also  notice there are no options for Catfish itself. This makes Catfish focus only on the searching so it is as efficient as possible.

To enter a search you need to take into consideration what type of search you want to do. On my particular system I have Beagle, find, and locate installed. So I can choose from any of those three to handle my results. The reason I say to consider which type of search you are doing first is because the type of search will determine the types of options you have available. For instance, if I use find the Fulltext Search option is not available. If I use Beagle I can not use wildcards in my searching.

Because of this, I like to select my search type first. Once I have selected the type I go back and enter the search string and define any options I may want.

Figure 2

Let’s do a Beagle search for the string “ghacks” (no quotes). I will select to add Hidden files as well as Fulltext search.

Once I have everything configured I hit Find and the results will appear in the right pane (see Figure 2). You can click on the results to open a suitable application. For instance, if I click on the ghacks.png result, on my Enligtenment desktop, the file will open in GQview. If I click on one of the folders I get an error because there is no application associated with them. I can, however, right click the folder and choose to copy the folder or save to a file. If I double click on the archive file File Roller will open with the archive.

Final thoughts

If you do much searching on your drive, and you use different tools for different types of searches, you should certainly employ Catfish to make your searching easier.

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But your GNOME desktop might not have beagle set up to work out of the box. You might have to take a few steps to get the beagle daemon running and indexing. This article will tell you just how to do so.

The first thing you need to do is make sure you have everything installed. Open up the Add/Remove Software application and do a search for “beagle”. You will want to install everything for the Beagle system as well as any of the backends for any applications you want Beagle to index (including Evolution, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.)

Once you have everything installed you will then need to start the Beagle Daemon. This can be done a couple of ways. The easiest way is to open up a terminal window and issue the command beagled. You can find out instantly if the daemon is running by issuing the command beagle-ping if you see something like Daemon version: 0.3.8 you are good to go.

If you want to make sure the daemon runs every time at login you can set this up with the beagle-settings tool. To open up the settings you can either issue the command beagle-settings or go go the System menu. click on Preferences, and then click the Search & Indexing entry.

Beagle Settings Window

Make sure you have the Start search & indexing automatically check box clicked. If you are using a laptop it would be wise to uncheck Index data while on battery power.

Once you have that configured, click OK and you are set.

Now if you go to the standard search you will not be using Beagle. On my installed GNOME 2.24 there was no icon or menu entry for the Beagle Search tool. I actually had to create one. The command you need to issue to open the Beagle Search tool is beagle-search. You can create an application launcher or desktop icon for this. The quickest is to add a launcher to your panel. Do this by right clicking the panel and selecting Add To Panel. Once the new window opens select Custom Application Launcher.

If you want to get the actual Beagle icon you will need to point the icon locater to /usr/share/beagle/webinterface/images/.

Launcher Settings

Upon first launch of the daemon, depending upon the power of your system, Beagle can take a while to index all of the files and data. Most likely you will not even notice any hit on the system from the daemon running. If you do you can always tweak the Beagle settings to better suit your needs.

Beagle Search Window

When you open up the Beagle Search window you can select where to search and then enter what to search for. As you can (in the image to the left) Beagle categorizes each hit on the search.

Final Thoughts

Comprehensive searching can be critical to efficient work on a computer. The Beagle search tool blows away the standard search and should be a must-have on every GNOME desktop you run.

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