Kerry Beagle Desktop Search

[image:1819 align=right] The KDE desktop of SUSE Linux 10.1 (and the future enterprise products built on it) will contain a KDE frontend for Beagle called Kerry. For this Beagle has been splitted into non-GUI and GUI parts, some backends are now in sub-packages (Evolution, Firefox) and the libbeagle API has been improved in parts. Besides generic file indexing Beagle already contains backends written by Debajyoti Bera and others for KMail, Kopete and Konqueror's web history cache.

[image:1818 align=left hspace=5]Kerry resembles the previous clean Best frontend but with better KDE integration (autostart, global shortcuts, DCOP call for searching etc.) and some improvements like help texts, sorting by relevance / name / modification date and searching the term in the clipboard) compared to it. If you have one of the SUSE Linux 10.1 Betas (Beta 5 is due tomorrow) installed you can click on its system tray icon right now or invoke it with one of the shortcuts F12 or Alt-Space.

Debajyoti's kio-beagle gets also installed, that means you can enter "beagle:<searchterm>" within all KDE file dialogs (including the ones of OpenOffice.org/KDE) and of course file managers like Konqueror (hint: bookmark your regular searches).

Some Beagle wishes for the future: working Akregator/KDE 3.5 backend, a Konversation backend and long term a more complete backend for Kontact (addressbook, calendar) or Akonadi.

PS: This weekend's FOSDEM 2006 is a good place to learn more about KDE, openSUSE and Beagle - and to ask for Marcus.