After seeing Google Desktop Search on a windows machine some months ago I quickly installed beagle on my system and have since been updating to every new version as soon as it showd up in portage.
Beagle creates an index of all man pages, applications, mails, contacts and whatever is in my home directory. A quick search will reveal any file and beagle has been a great help during the last months.
The only problem with beagle is its memory consumption: with a complete index of my home directory and all mails beagle takes up at least 70 megabyte in memory and 1.4 gigabyte on the disk.

When searching for the newest beagle ebuild in the Gentoo bugtracker I found a request for tracker. Meta tracker is planned to be a small replacement for beagle that should take up only a few megs of ram. The screenshots on the tracker project page show a low memory usage of 4 megs, but the search window does not seem to be as clean as beagle’s. Right now tracker is still masked unstable in portage, but I’ll sure try to install it anyway during the weekend.

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