path: root/README

Table of Contents

    1 Introduction
    2 Use cases
    3 Features
    4 Dependencies
        4.1 Recommended dependencies
        4.2 For building Tracker's Deskbar-applet backend
    5 Compilation
        5.1 Notes on Solaris
        5.2 Compile options
    6 Running Tracker
        6.1 Usage
        6.2 Setting inotify watch limit
        6.3 Tracker files
    7 Integration with other tools
        7.1 Nautilus search
        7.2 Deskbar applet
    8 Tracker tools

1 Introduction

  Tracker is a powerful desktop-neutral first class object
  database, tag/metadata database, search tool and indexer.

  Tracker is also extremely fast and very memory-efficient
  when compared with some other competing frameworks and has by
  far the fastest and most memory-efficient Nautilus search and
  Deskbar backends currently available.

  It consists of a common object database that allows entities to
  have an almost infinte number of properties, metadata (both
  embedded/harvested as well as user definable), a comprehensive
  database of keywords/tags and links to other entities.

  It provides additional features for file-based objects
  including context linking and audit trails for a file object.

  It has the ability to index, store, harvest metadata, retrieve
  and search all types of files and other first class objects.

  Supported first class objects include:

  * Files, Documents, Music, Images, Videos, Applications, Emails,
    Conversations, Playlists

  Planned support:

  * Appointments, Contacts, Projects, Tasks, Bookmarks, Notes,
    Firefox Web History

  All discussion related to tracker happens on the Tracker
  mailing list
  
        http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/tracker-list

  IRC channel #tracker on:

        irc.gimp.net

  Bugs should be filed at:

        http://bugzilla.gnome.org.

  More infomation on Tracker can be found at

        http://tracker-project.org.

2 Use Cases

  Tracker is the most powerful open source metadata database and
  indexer framework currently available and because it is built
  around a combination indexer and sql database and not a
  dedicated indexer, it has much more powerful use cases:

  * Provide search and indexing facilities similiar to those on
  other systems (Windows Vista and Mac OS X).

  * Common database storage for all first class objects (e.g. a
  common music/photo/contacts/email/bookmarks/history database)
  complete with additional metadata and tags/keywords.

  * Comprehensive one stop solution for all applications needing
  an object database, powerful search (via RDF Query), first class
  methods, related metadata and user-definable metadata/tags.

  * Can provide a full semantic desktop with metadata everywhere.

  * Can provide powerful criteria-based searching suitable for
  creating smart file dialogs and vfolder systems.

  * Can provide a more intelligent desktop using statistical
  metadata.

3 Features

  * Desktop-neutral design (it's a freedesktop product built
  around other freedesktop technologies like D-Bus and XDGMime
  but contains no GNOME-specific dependencies besides GLib).

  * Very memory efficient and non-leaking (typical RAM usage 4 - 30
  MB). Unlike some other indexers, Tracker is designed and built
  to run well on systems with lower memory (256MB or less). It
  should even be efficient enough to use on some mobile devices.

  * Non-bloated and written in C for maximum efficiency.

  * Small size and minimal dependencies makes it easy to bundle
  into various distros, including live cds.

  * Fast indexing and unobtrusive - no need to index stuff
  overnight. Tracker runs at nice+10 so it should have a minimal
  impact on your system. With the addition of detection of mouse
  and keyboard events via tracker-applet (described below), there
  is an option to auto-pause indexing in order to improve
  responsiveness. This is in addition to Tracker's built-in check
  if there's heavy disk I/O in order to auto-pause, so not to
  slow other processes.

  * Provides option to disable indexing when running on battery.

  * Provides option to index removable devices.

  * Implements the freedesktop specification for metadata
  (http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards/shared-filemetadata-spec).

  * Extracts embedded File, Image, Document and Audio type
  metadata from files.

  * Supports the WC3's RDF Query syntax for querying metadata

  * Provides support for both free text search (like Beagle/Google)
  as well as structured searches using RDF Query.

  * Responds in real time to file system changes to keep its
  metadata database up to date and in sync.

  * Fully extensible with custom metadata - you can store,
  retrieve, register and search via RDF Query all your own custom
  metadata.

  * Can extract a file's contents as plain text and index them.

  * Provides text filters for PDF, MS Office, OpenOffice (all
  versions), HTML and PS files.

  * Can provide thumbnailing on the fly.

  * It auto-pauses indexing when running low on diskspace.

4 Dependencies

4.1 Recommended dependencies

  * GStreamer 0.10 + plugins for audio/video file indexing
  * xsltproc
  * w3m
  * wv 1.0.2
  * poppler (pdftotext)
  * odt2txt 0.4 (indexing OpenOffice/ODF documents)
  * libvorbis
  * libpng
  * libexif
  * libgsf
  * libglade 2.5
  * libxml2
  * libxml2 (for extracting html/xml content)
  * unac (accent stripper)
  * exempi
  * hal 0.5 (for detection of removable devices, mounted
    directories, as well as whether the computer is running on
    battery)
  * GTK and GNOME stack (for GUI tools)
  * totem-plparser (for playlist extraction)

4.2 For building Tracker's Deskbar-applet backend

  * python-dev 2.3
  * python-gtk2-dev 2.3
  * deskbar-applet 2.16

5 Compilation

  To compile and install Tracker, use the following commands :

        ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var
        make
        sudo make install

  If you install using any other prefix, you might have problems
  with files not being installed correctly. (You may need to copy
  and amend the dbus service file to the correct directory and/or
  might need to update ld_conf if you install into non-standard
  directories.)

5.1 Notes on Solaris

  To compile Tracker with GCC on Solaris uses the following
  commands :

        CFLAGS="-D_POSIX_PTHREAD_SEMANTICS" ./configure \
	--prefix=/usr \
	--sysconfdir=/etc \
        --localstatedir=/var \
	--with-pic

        make
        sudo make install

  To compile Tracker with SUN Studio on Solaris uses the
  following commands, because there are some problems to compile
  exiv2 using SUN C++ compiler :

        CFLAGS="-D_POSIX_PTHREAD_SEMANTICS" ./configure \
	--prefix=/usr \
	--sysconfdir=/etc \
        --localstatedir=/var \
	--with-pic \
        --disable-exiv2

        make
        sudo make install

5.2 Compile Options

  Tracker has several compiler options to enable/disable certain
  features. You can get a full listing by running

  	./configure --help

6 Running Tracker

6.1 Usage

  To run Tracker, you can manually start the Tracker daemon, 
  trackerd. This is run for you if you issue a DBus call to the daemon
  API.

  You can also pass a directory root to be indexed as a command
  line parameter if you dont want your entire home directory
  indexed, e.g. "trackerd -i /home/jamie/Documents" (if you want
  your home directory indexed when explicily specifying index
  directory roots then you must add your home directory to the
  arguments: e.g. trackerd -i /home/jamie -i /mnt/share)

  You can disable indexing by passing "--no-indexing"

  You can enable a low memory usage mode (recommended for
  machines with less than 256MB of RAM) by passing
  "--enable-low-memory"

  You can artificially throttle indexing by passing
  "--throttle=VALUE" where VALUE is in the range 0-20 (with 0,
  the default, being fastest and 20 being slowest). Default is
  0. You should only change this value if you want to prevent
  noisy fans or hot laptops arising from cpu intensive indexing.
  Tracker should have a negligible impact on the system (as it
  is scheduled) so you can safely work with it on full throttle
  without experiencing slow downs.

  You can specify directory roots to be excluded from being
  watched or indexed by passing "--exclude=DIRECTORY" for each
  directory root.

  You can specify logging verbosity by passing "--verbosity". Valid
  values are from 0 to 3, ranging from least to most verbose
  respectively.

  Yet another option is "--language" which allows for specifying
  the language to use for stemmer and stop-words list.

  All the above options (and more) can be set by editing Tracker
  config file "~/.config/tracker/tracker.cfg" which is created
  with specific defaults when non-existent (e.g. when trackerd is
  ran for the first time). Ensure that you restart trackerd for
  the changes to take effect. "tracker.cfg" also provides options
  that allows Tracker to only index a subset of your home
  directory as well as other folders not in your home directory
  by setting WatchDirectoryRoots to a semicolon-delimited list of
  directories (full path required!)

  e.g.:

  "WatchDirectoryRoots=directory1;directory2;directory3""

  An additional option is "--reindex" which indexes user data from
  scratch, removing the need to delete Tracker's database manually.
  Keywords and metadata definitions are preserved however.

  On the first run, Tracker will automatically create a new
  database and start populating it with metadata by browsing
  through the user's home directory and/or the root folder(s)
  specified.

  On subsequent runs, Tracker will start up much much faster and
  will only ever incrementally index files (IE files that have
  changed since last index).

  If installed correctly, the Tracker daemon (trackerd) can also
  be started automatically via Dbus activation (e.g. by running
  tracker-search SEARCHTERM)

6.2 Setting Inotify Watch Limit

  When watching large numbers of folders, its ppossible to exceed
  the default number of inotify watches. In order to get real time
  updates when this value is exceeded it is necessary to increase
  the number of allowed watches. This can be done as follows:

  1. Add this line to /etc/sysctl.conf:
     "fs.inotify.max_user_watches = (number of folders to be
      watched; default used to be 8192 and now is 524288)"

  2. Reboot the system OR (on a Debian-like system) run
     "sudo /etc/init.d/procps restart"

6.3 Tracker files

  Here are some of the files that Tracker creates and uses for its
  operation, apart from "~/.config/tracker/tracker.cfg" which is stated
  in Sec 6.1 above:

  * "~/.local/share/tracker" is used for non-expendable content,
    like keywords and metadata definitions.

  * "~/.cache/tracker" is used for the expendable indexes and
    expendable metadata that can be rebuilt if deleted (this is the
    purpose of the ".cache" - its more a permanent tmp directory than
    sys tmp but can be deleted if more disk space is needed).

  * The system tmp ("/var/tmp" and "/tmp") is used for short-lived
    session data.

7 Integration with other tools

7.1 Nautilus Search

  Once you have installed Tracker and have some indexed contents,
  you should now compile Nautilus (ver 2.13.4 or higher) which
  should auto-detect that Tracker is installed and automatically
  compile in Tracker support. You are now ready to appreciate a
  powerful and super efficient C-based indexer in all its
  glory... happy hunting!

  To make sure trackerd always starts when you login to GNOME,
  you will need to add it to gnome-session (select sessions from
  preferences menu, select startup program tab and then add
  /usr/bin/trackerd). For non-GNOME installations, see the
  desktop docs for how to achieve similar.

7.2 Deskbar applet

  Tracker is also integrated into GNOME's deskbar applet.
  
  Here are the compile options on how to get it built:

    --enable-deskbar-applet=(auto/handler/module)

      Enables Deskbar-applet support; 'auto' should do since it
      automatically chooses whether to install the 'handler' (for
      Deskbar-applet >=2.16) or the 'module' (for Deskbar-applet
      >=2.19) 	  	  	 

    --with-deskbar-applet-dir=(directory)
    
      This sets where Deskbar-applet should find the tracker-handler;
      this should be automatically detected, perhaps in
      /usr/lib/deskbar-applet/{handlers,modules-2.20-compatible} 

8 Tracker Tools

  The Tracker distribution comes with a number of useful utilities which
  are listed at the bottom of trackerd man page, "man trackerd". It's
  recommended that you use the "--help" command line switch
  (e.g., "tracker-services --help") for more up-to-date usage
  information.