[lug] Report on Kat

[Jeff Schroeder]

Michael wrote:

> I've been quite intrigued by reports of Kat. It is a new desktop
> search/DB for KDE.
> (snip)
> I'd love to hear of others' experiences, or even some instructions on
> how to set it up so it doesn't break things.

Like you, I thought it sounded great and I downloaded and installed it.  
This was perhaps two months ago, meaning it was a few minor versions 
behind where it is now.

My experience was exactly the same as yours: KDE thrashed and Kat 
finally died... hard.  I was able to index directories containing 
perhaps a half-dozen subdirectories and no more than a hundred files, 
but any serious directory structure just plain didn't work.  I 
experimented with a few different things-- ext3 vs NFS vs tmpfs, deep 
directories vs shallow, etc.  The results were pretty much the same.

In the end I shelved it as "I'll look at it again in six months", hoping 
it would be more ready for the big time.  It sounds like nothing has 
changed much in the last few months.  It's too bad, because the only 
other "nice" Linux desktop search engine I can find is Beagle... and 
it's Gnome-centric.  As a hard-core KDE user, I don't want to install 
the six billion support libraries I'd need to run it. ;)  There's 
another one called Klucene or Kiocene (?) but I had segfault problems 
with it.

If anyone knows of a nice solid desktop search engine-- especially one 
for KDE-- I'd love to hear about it.

Jeff