Ashton Mills02 July 2007, 9:41 AM
Hands up if you're tired of all the iPhone hype? Yes Apple's iPhone is all the rage right now, and sexy though it may be there are stillotherthings happening in the universe right now. Here's two of them.
Hands up if you're tired of all the iPhone hype? Yes Apple's iPhone is all the rage right now, and sexy though it may be there are still other things happening in the universe right now. Here's two of them.
So Google has finally released its Desktop for Linux, which bundles such joys as the Quick Search Box, File Versioning, and of course its popular searching technology to index all manner of data on your drive, from files to images.
And before you ask, it's closed source. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, and despite extensively using and supporting open-source it doesn't mean the company has to release open-source applications for the platform. After all, the core of Google Desktop is searching, the very core of Google's business model.
However, for those of us on Linux there isn't that great an impetus to install Google Desktop -- it's not the first global indexing metadata based search tool for Tux. There's Beagle, itself inspired by Apple's Spotlight, which does everything Google Desktop does except perhaps not interfacing with Gmail.
And more recently, there's also Tracker which while still in the early stages is looking to supercede Beagle quite nicely -- it's less resource intensive, and works in the background without you even noticing. I'm running it now actually, and while it doesn't index quite as many formats as Beagle or Google Desktop at the moment, it's performing rather nicely.
I'd tell you how its performance compares to Google Desktop, but I can't install it. There's no 64-bit binaries from Google, and no immediate plans to release them. I'm pretty sure the ratio of 64-bit to 32-bit installs for Linux is substantially higher than that of Windows, so it's somewhat disappointing. This is largely because just about everything, bar Flash and some codecs, works with the 64-bit versions of Linux, and all thanks to the joys of open-source -- many programs can be easily compiled for either architecture.
Just as well we've got Tracker then, eh?
 Tracker: Not Google Desktop, but it's getting there, and integrated into Deskbar too. |
GPLv3 released
Well, like it says on the tin. Go here for the announcement and here for the license itself (just some light bed time reading). Look out for this month's APC Mag where I discuss some of the new features of the license and what it means for open source.
Yes, I just hyperlinked to a paper format. Now you've seen it all.