Ultimate desktop search: Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 and Beagle

James Bannan:

The stuff which Novell has done with SUSE is nothing short of incredible. I administer a Novell network, and there really is a push to go with SLED10 as the next OS rather than Vista (not that it will happen, but it would have been cool).

The integration of desktop and server technologies is just phenomenal...SIGH!

Nobody U. Know:

i wasn't aware there were only 2 operating systems in the entire world w/ desktop search. hmmmm. maybe the author should try os x's spotlight and get a clue...

Shane:

Might have been useful to objectively compare Novell's integration of beagle in SLED 10 with Apple's integration of spotlight in OS X. This article makes no mention of spotlight despite declaring SLED 10 as having the best integrated desktop search.

Hanzo:

of course nobody can really know how things went... but as far as I remember all of this search and indexing stuff like Spotlight, the born dead WinFs, Google desktop search and of course Beagle came out in form of ideas more or less in the same time... or better, the first one presented to the pubblic, as far as I remember, was beagle. Then of course Apple has been faster than anybody else in transporting the idea to a concrete implementation in the os. At the same time we must admit that spotlight was more a showing what the tecnology could do so far... only with Leopard we'll see what it can really do.
Anyway. Beagle is really an impressive app and it's not a question of who had which idea... more: who makes it better? because as long as the players in the game carry on improving things to be better than their competitors, we, the end user, always have gain!

Luke Evans:

I certainly hope this will beincluded on a cover disc in the not too distant future

Micke:

Novell has done a really good job with all the nice features such as beagle in SLED10.
I read a comment above and the thing with OSX is that you can't get only the software and use your existing hardware as you can with SLED10.

CDee:

This article has no content what so ever, perhaps a more thought out review of desk searching, including the main three OS's not just Linux and Windows.

The best desktop search ive used out of all three is Mac OSX Spotlight, it's fast, well designed and very accessible.

The second would be beagle, again it's good but sometimes the indexing takes a little time, and there are a couple of little niggles with it.

The worst of the three has to be Any desktop search on Windows including Vista. The Windows XP add on search's from any software company (google, blinkx, Microsoft) are slow, a pain to access and eat resources like they are going out of business. The copernic search is about the best of the bunch, but they are nothing compared to Mac OSX and Linux. Vista's search doesn't even index word documents, so if you need to search for it, you have to still do it by filename and not by content in the document (yes it's beta so fingers crossed that this is cleaned up and sorted out for the final).

It's a real shame as i like all OS's (Mac OSX being my fravourite), and having a good search in Windows would not only please me, but all of my clients. As a lot of them having thousands of documents scattered across their hard disks, being able to do a fast search a la Spotlight would have been a dream come true. It's a real shame microsoft couldn't deliver WinFS.

I'm pleased that Linux is moving ahead and adapting and integrating features that benefit all users of linux.

Declan Kennedy:

"This article has no content what so ever"

Ouch! Tell me what you really think.

As Micke said moments before:

"I read a comment above and the thing with OSX is that you can’t get only the software and use your existing hardware as you can with SLED10."

OS X and Spotlight are great, but it will be impossible to fairly judge the Apple implementation until it will run on as wide a variety of hardware as Suse. The portability of Suse is one of the reasons that it has such potential in the enterprise realm - an inexpensive software upgrade for a potentially huge productivity boost.

Lend me your Mac and I'll put Suse on it, but (sadly) the same can't be said if the roles are reversed. Some day Apple... some day.

Shane:

You can't compare them fairly, but you are comfortable with declaring SLED 10's implementation the best? This article would be a introductory piece of SLED's search facilities, but the title is misleading at best.

Jamie Conlon:

Overall I like your article, it was enjoyable to read and has some nice information.

But I really dislike your paragraph starting "In typical FOSS fashion". Not only do you imply Beagle is a ripoff of google desktop, which is incorrect, Beagle was first, but you imply that most FOSS does this with similar products.

That paragraph is somewhat offensive, imo.

Overwise I enjoyed your article.

Dan Warne:

Anyway, Apple's Spotlight implementation leaves a LOT to be desired. For a start, results are far from instant, and the results display is too sparse to be useful. For example it will show 20 identically named emails with no further excerpt information to help you figure out which one is which. No doubt it will be improved in 10.5.

Amazingly enough I think the best desktop search implementation I've seen yet is Windows Desktop Search. It's remarkably good. It can show more results than Google Desktop Search can in one page, and the OS integration is good (for obvious reasons).

I wrote about it here:
Listen up, Microsoft! [warning: this is on our ugly old legacy site]

... and I was amazed to see that a Microsoft developer had recently posted on his blog in response to my post!

Dan Warne wants to know if we're listening

Hayden M.:

I have an iBook loaded with OS 10.4 and to tell you the truth I'm not that thrilled with Spotlight. Nor Beagle or that matter, although I do like Beagle over Spotlight as it seems "snappier".

The only indexed filesystem search that I found to be truly "seemless" was in BeOS 5. It's implementation (although not as eye catching and "gimmicky" as todays ones) seemed to be more functional and a lot faster. If a company even came close to the power and ease of use it had then... (insert end of sentence here).

All current implementaion are just applications and/or extensions to a standard (journalled/64 bit/etc etc) filesystems. I like what Microsoft was(is?) trying to do with WinFS. The fact that they developed it shows that our current filesystems aren't the most efficient storage medium when you want searchable data and we need to approach file/data storage a different way to have something that gives us real (insert word[s] I can't quite think of right now, here).

Any-who, I still use OS X.

bob:

Of course, do not mention that beagle is available to the same level of integration in countless Linux distributions (its just a standard thing after all), who do not have any marketing agent like Novell.

So, Linux Distros as a whole has the "best all around search desktop" too.

Ehh.

s_groening:

Declan Kennedy wrote:

'OS X and Spotlight are great, but it will be impossible to fairly judge the Apple implementation until it will run on as wide a variety of hardware as Suse. The portability of Suse is one of the reasons that it has such potential in the enterprise realm - an inexpensive software upgrade for a potentially huge productivity boost.

Lend me your Mac and I’ll put Suse on it, but (sadly) the same can’t be said if the roles are reversed. Some day Apple… some day.'


This remark is utterly and completely illogical. Spotlight and thus Mac OS X 10.4.7 runs on two different platforms, PowerPC and Intel x86. This is one more than SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (SLED 10), leaving room for comparison that is not directly possible on SLED 10.

The freedom you speak of is that of choice of hardware on your platform of choice. This equals to a supermarket where you can choose one type of product but choose from tens or hundreds of manufacturers eventhough they all produce the same sort of product.
Apple on the other hand gives you limited selection but that has nothing to do with the capabilities of their software...

Actually, I have often experienced very different things from the same Linux distribution installed on different hardware of the same platform. NVidia's drivers do not work for me on my Ubuntu 6.06 'Dapper Drake', however, on my Fedora Core 4 it just works! -On the same hardware!

This is just to say that SLED 10 might not cut it in some respects on some hardware and it might very well do so on other... And again, SLED 10 is not just Beagle... The implementation is sure nice, however, I have the same functionality on my Ubuntu desktop - it just might not be exactly as tightly integrated - meaning that Beagle is by no means SLED 10 only...

Concerning the issue of portability, portability is a term used to describe the degree to which a piece of software is adaptable to either a different software or hardware platform. SLED 10 will never run on my PPC Mac, which of course is not a new intel based Mac like you probably thought of in your remark, but yet it is still a Mac...and it still runs Spotlight... Sticking to Beagle, Beagle is hardware-wise very portable, because Linux has this attrribute... On the other hand, Beagle only works the way it does on Linux, and is thereby not very portable in respect to software... The Linux kernel includes a piece called 'inotify' which is a piece of kernel software that automagically detects new files in your home directory, giving Beagle access to wonderful and valuable live query data. This does not work properly on, say FreeBSD og Solaris, since Beagle does not provide these live query features entirely by itself - it relies on the kernel to do some of the dirty work...

And Beagle's job is affected by the amount of RAM, the speed f the harddrive and the processor's speed... Just as Spotlight's performance is... SLED 10 being inexpensive is a good reason for choosing it [over Windows XP/Vista e.g.] but not the main qquality of the prodduct. Enterprises know this!

This is why I think it is impossible to judge Beagle as seen in SLED 10 as being better than Spotlight, based on the set of premises you present.

Kevin Wright:

Joe Shaw's talk at Guadec about beagle can be found here:
http://joeshaw.org/Beagle-GUADEC2006.pdf

Pasco:

People love Spotlight because for many that is their first experience with indexed desktop searching and Mac fanatics love to believe that Jobs invented everything. But it won't really be right until at least 10.5. There are no boolean operators and the results don't even return as much info about a particular document as the Windows Desktop Search add on.

Hayden is right. It is amazing that, what is it now? 10 years ago there was a journaling filing system that was 64-bit capable, understood metadata, supported custom filesystem attributes, acted as basically a relational database and was truly instant.

It is too bad about the WinFS failure because the rest of these solutions are okay, they are pretty good for just searching but they don't offer the extensible power that a real db style filing system would.

Roberto J. Dohnert:

I get the same instant results as the author claims here with Windows Desktop Search and Copernic Desktop Searc. This "testimonial" sounds like nothing more than a fan of SUSE Linux trying to hype some of its features. I have downloaded the RC of SLED 10 and had more problems getting it to work properly than I have had suiccesses.

stuhood:

One of the neatest things in SUSE10 IMO is that there is integrated search in the file chooser. When you click any 'Browse...' or 'Open...' button, you can highlight the Search option, and immediately find the file you are looking for. Handy indeed!

CpILL:

I use OS X and think Spotlight is slow and inferior. Proof: Quicksilver uptake hasn't slowed after Spotlight was introduced. True they aren't exactly the same thing but I use Spotlight only when I have to for all of the complains above but mainly because its slow (even after their speed patch).

And just for the record, dang Mac users are nauseating the way they get offended at EVERYTHING and then need to blow their horn to the point they can't be objective anymore. I mean I use an Mac, and like it, but so what! Its just another company. GET. OVER. IT.

I thought the article was good and considering it _is_ a Linux column I don't expect it to cover _all_ the OS.

In truth I hardly need to use file searches coz I grew up in an era where if you had to organise your own files and so I do now. what would be more handily is to remind me _in context_ about the condense of certain document that I might be relevant to what I am typing or reading. I find I have so much sometimes I just forget what it is, but I would always know where to look for it if I did manage to remember... does Beagle do something like this?

Robert:

Oh dear. The Apple PR team have arrived.

Seriously, you mention google desktop search. Beagle has been in development since long before google desktop search appeared. And Spotlight.

Mark:

Fedora Core 5 has had all of these features (beagle with all the same indexing capabilities, tomboy notes) before SuSE. Give credit where credit is due.

Kevin:

Not exactly. Beagle first came in SUSE LINUX 9.3, released in April 2005.

James Byron:

I've used OS X's spotlight and it is far less usable than Beagle. It doesn't handle nearly as many formats or present the results in such a way as to make them as easily accessible as beagle. Sorry Mac fanboi's, but Novell has the upper hand here... Apple could learn a thing or two about usability from them.

Danny Cones:

SLED is very usefull w/ the beagle integration. What I find amazing here is how many people simple tout spotlight like it's the get all be all- an god knows none of these mac users have tried beagle on any distro- (ok maybe one or two) much less than sled 10- which has only been out a a demo for less than 2 weeks.

I published a review of sled on my blog if anyone is interested.

Wanawanga:

"This remark is utterly and completely illogical. Spotlight and thus Mac OS X 10.4.7 runs on two different platforms, PowerPC and Intel x86."

Well, not actually. It runs on one platform, Apple hardware. PowerPC or x86 isn't relevant, because OS X is locked to Apple versions of these systems. The original poster was certainly referring to the fact that SUSE can be installed on most any hardware that you'll find laying around the typical geek basement or in a second-hand computer shop. Not the case with OS X.

Of course the original poster was certainly referring to SUSE Linux, not SLED, which is what this article refers to. SLED is NOT avilable for PPC, only x86 and it's compatible cousins. Common confusion among the half informed. SLED is not SUSE and SUSE is not SLED. SUSE is to SLED what FEDORA is to RHEL.

Ord:

Not that this means anything, but it's fairly well known that Beagle was long in development before Spotlight. A look at the changelogs on the Source Forge page proves this.

As a recent Mac --> Linux switcher I have to say that Beagle is far superior anyway. It's simply faster, doesn't get in the way and allows me to customise indexing to fit the way I work, based on what I use. I never thought I'd say this but I'm simply more productive on Linux, and Beagle has helped this along in a big way.

The Beagle tagging system is also really intuitive, especially when dealing with large collections of media - I don't want to have to think about tagging when I'm working with my data. Best of all, Beagle didn't cost me anything, unlike Tiger which I paid a mint for!

Declan Kennedy:

"You can’t compare them fairly, but you are comfortable with declaring SLED 10’s implementation the best? This article would be a introductory piece of SLED’s search facilities, but the title is misleading at best."

I'll be sure to say a rosary. K?

"Of course, do not mention that beagle is available to the same level of integration in countless Linux distributions (its just a standard thing after all), who do not have any marketing agent like Novell.

So, Linux Distros as a whole has the “best all around search desktop” too."

Spoken like somebody who hasn't tried SLED10. Seriously, try it. The usability and accessibility work that has gone into it is nothing short of a revelation.

To put it another way, the Beagle technology has been integrated for a while, that's true. However, it always felt like a search application installed on my desktop - Beagle is so seamlessly integrated in SLED10 that it feels like a part of the OS.

"This remark is utterly and completely illogical. Spotlight and thus Mac OS X 10.4.7 runs on two different platforms, PowerPC and Intel x86. This is one more than SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (SLED 10), leaving room for comparison that is not directly possible on SLED 10."

If an OS runs on a generic x86 CPU, it's more portable than Mac OS X. Not my fault, but true. I swear, only in arguments with Mac zealots do you find yourself stating truisms.

Once again: can I borrow your OS X x86 DVD and install it on my Dell easily and legally? No. And until I can, SLED10 is still more portable than OS X. Hell, with Bootcamp, even Windows is more portable than OS X.

"Of course the original poster was certainly referring to SUSE Linux, not SLED, which is what this article refers to. SLED is NOT avilable for PPC, only x86 and it’s compatible cousins. Common confusion among the half informed. SLED is not SUSE and SUSE is not SLED. SUSE is to SLED what FEDORA is to RHEL."

Lolz, thanks for the backhanded insult there buddy, but you're wrong anyway (common confusion among the half informed, perhaps?). OpenSUSE is to SUSE what FEDORA is to RHEL - SLED is to SUSE what Vista is to XP; same manufacturer (not a sponsored community prohect), rolls a lot of common code together, but is still a new OS with a lot of new features.

You're all right, of course. SLED10 doesn't run on PPC, which simply means that Novell takes the platform about as seriously as Apple does.

Mark:

I've been running SLED 10 for the past week and have to say beagle is great but so is the whole OS. If CTO's and Sys Admins around the country are not paying attention too SLED they all need their heads read or their employment reviewed, this is desktop computing as it should be, it would be a no brainer to deploy this in any enterprise. Novell have kicked a real goal with this one but only time will tell how many see the light.

Declan Kennedy:

Sorry, Jamie I missed this first time:

"But I really dislike your paragraph starting “In typical FOSS fashion”. Not only do you imply Beagle is a ripoff of google desktop, which is incorrect, Beagle was first, but you imply that most FOSS does this with similar products."

What I was actually implying was that, when FOSS developers see an idea which is good but has some implementation problems, they fix the problems and make the software better. A great example is Firefox, taken from an arguably broken codebase and turned into the best browser there is.

I didn't mean to imply that FOSS lacks innovation, quite the opposite actually. And you're right, Beagle was first, but Google Desktop Search in Windows and Spotlight in OS X were the first widely used implementations of the desktop search paradigm.

Besides, who comes first doesn't matter to me, it's who does it best. Look out for my full review of SLED10 very soon, this piece was very much about first impressions. There's a new RHEL release coming out soon, so it might even be possible to do a head to head.

Tom Russell:

Good article Declan, my boss is finally interested in a company wide Linux solution. I run the only Linux desktops.

Some questions on cost analysis. This may be a bit off topic, but it would be helpful when talking to upper management to whom the bottom line is a mandatory factor when making migration decisions.

Will beagle search a dual boot SLED 10 and XP or OS X machine?
Are there enterprise search limitation controls for beagle?

What is the basic cost of installing SLED10 versus the equivalent application mix on XP and OS X?
What are the median costs for the recommended (not minimum) hardware for each installation?

If one has a certified support engineer for each platform already inhouse, how many machines of each of the three types can they effectively manage?
What is the cost of training such an engineer for each platform?

Just a short list of questions, don't want to overtax anyone's understanding of the situation especially the boss.

Wanawanga:

"Lolz, thanks for the backhanded insult there buddy, but you’re wrong anyway (common confusion among the half informed, perhaps?). OpenSUSE is to SUSE what FEDORA is to RHEL - SLED is to SUSE what Vista is to XP; same manufacturer (not a sponsored community prohect), rolls a lot of common code together, but is still a new OS with a lot of new features."

You proved my point with your own statement.

OpenSUSE is not a distribution, it is the name of the project that brings forth SUSE Linux.

In fact, he first words on the OpenSUSE.org website are "The openSUSE project is a worldwide community program sponsored by Novell that promotes the use of Linux everywhere. The program provides anyone with free and easy access to the world's most usable Linux distribution, SUSE Linux."

So there is no OpenSUSE to SUSE contrast as you indicate. SLED 10 is certainly based off of SUSE 10.1 as was known to anyone who had access to Novell's private beta roadmap for SLED 10 (not the publicly known beta roadmap for SUSE 10.1 posted on the OpenSUSE website). In fact, one of the most recent delays of significance to SLED 10 was to help iron out the bugs in the new package management system that was rushed into SUSE 10.1 during the beta cycles.

As for comparing contrast XP/Vista to SUSE 10/SLED 10.1, you're attempting to compare the differences between two operating systems that will have been released more that 3 years apart (if not more) to two that are being released (if schedule hold) only three months apart. Does not compute.

In fact, my analogy of FEDORA/RHEL vs SUSE/SLED is only inaccurate in that SUSE & SLED are, at this time, much LESS forked from each other than the current versions of FEDORA & RHEL are.

Declan Kennedy:

Hi Tom, I'll do my best to answer those questions, but we haven't had time to do a complete review of the OS here yet. We will do so very soon, and will get a better idea of any performance issues (particularly) at that time.

"Will beagle search a dual boot SLED 10 and XP or OS X machine?"

We'll test this in our review, but I don't see why it wouldn't. The read-only NTFS driver has been stable for a long time, so I'd imagine that Beagle will treat it as an indexable addition to the filesystem (if configured to do so, as mentioned below).

Dual-booting will be covered extensively in the review, as it's still the way that most desktop Linux installs are configured.

"Are there enterprise search limitation controls for beagle?"

Yes. A user's index lives in /home/user/.beagle, as do the configuration files necessary to specify particular folders to index for that user. By default, Beagle will only index a user's home folder.

This means that you can easily create a skeleton user with the correct settings already configured as defaults, then base all users on that profile.

"What is the basic cost of installing SLED10 versus the equivalent application mix on XP and OS X?"

I don't have the exact $AUD price at hand, but I'll put it in the review. SLED10 ships with a nice fat DVD full of software, and I would be very surprised if many enterprise environments needed things that weren't on it. Since OpenOffice.org now gladly opens MS Office documents (even VB Macros in Excel! Um... yay?), even Crossover Office is becoming less necessary.

There will also need to be some staff training which takes your TCO up. However, the modified Gnome desktop in a default install mimicks the Windows XP desktop, and the more radical differences between (for example) Windows and SLED, are mainly about making SLED easier to get started in for average users, so the training would not need to be extensive.

Consider also that Vista and Mac OS X will both almost certainly mandate a hardware purchase, whilst SLED10 is ready to go on current hardware. That alone takes the cost down considerably.

"What are the median costs for the recommended (not minimum) hardware for each installation?"

This is a hairy one. SLED is considerably more demanding than most Linux distributions, which is the price you pay for all the features. As such, the median requirements are higher than those of Windows XP, but then XP hasn't exactly been bringing PCs to their knees for quite a few years now.

Novell's take on the minimum:

- Intel PIII 500 MHz
- 256 MB RAM
- 800 MB HDD space
- 800x600 display

That's a very conservative estimate in my opinion, particularly if you'll be running XGL. Their recommended is more realistic:

- P4 2.4GHz+ or a CPU with 64bit extensions
- 512 MB RAM
- 2.5 GB HDD space
- 1024x768 display

Basically, you're looking for at least 1gb of RAM and modern CPU, meaning a 2.0ghz+ P4 or 1.5ghz+ Pentium M, Athlon or Core Duo. If your hardware is from the past two years, you shouldn't have to upgrade anything much but the RAM (if that).

And honestly even XGL isn't that demanding. I've played with XGL under a few distros (Ubuntu, Kororaa/Gentoo and SLED) and could even get smooth performance from a 32 MB GeforceFX 5200 notebook card with only 512 MB of system memory. Just so you know, they won't be slapping a Vista capable sticker on that machine any time soon.

"If one has a certified support engineer for each platform already inhouse, how many machines of each of the three types can they effectively manage?
What is the cost of training such an engineer for each platform?"

Now these ones are outside the scope of my experience of the OS so far, but I'm sure that Novell would give you a hand if you got in touch and explained your situation. As I said above, they're making a real push for the enterprise space at the moment, so I'm sure that they'd be more than happy to fill you in.

Declan Kennedy:

"You proved my point with your own statement.

OpenSUSE is not a distribution, it is the name of the project that brings forth SUSE Linux."

Or, to be more accurate, OpenSUSE is the Novell sponsored/managed community project which produces Suse Linux Community edition. Novell then uses that work as the basis for Suse Linux 10.1, sold as a supported retail product, which includes commercial/closed source applications in addition to the GPL software included in the downloadable community version. They also produce the retail product SLED10.

That was the distinction I had intended to make, and I chose to say OpenSUSE because I was feeling lazy, and didn't feel like typing "Suse Linux Community/FOSS edition produced by the OpenSUSE group and sponsored by Novell". Suse Linux Community and Retail are the same distro in many senses, but they're also different distros, using different licensing and distribution, and containing some different software.

Check out the download page on OpenSUSE and get the 411.

"SLED 10 is certainly based off of SUSE 10.1 as was known to anyone who had access to Novell’s private beta roadmap for SLED 10 (not the publicly known beta roadmap for SUSE 10.1 posted on the OpenSUSE website)."

Seriously mate, read my last response. I quite clearly indicated that they were different OS flavours from the same codebase.

"As for comparing contrast XP/Vista to SUSE 10/SLED 10.1, you’re attempting to compare the differences between two operating systems that will have been released more that 3 years apart (if not more) to two that are being released (if schedule hold) only three months apart. Does not compute."

(Typo?)

Except that wasn't the intended comparison. The comparison was to indicate that SLED10 is taking over from Suse Linux Retail at Novell in the same way that Vista will soon take over from XP at Microsoft. They are new operating systems that represent a shift in focus at each company from an older product to a new one.

The time that it has taken each company to achieve this isn't relevant to the comparison.

Frankly, the fact that this pedantic and reductivist argument started over PPC support for desktops is ridiculous. Outside the server room, the number of PPC systems in the enterprise world is miniscule, which is probably why Novell has released Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 for PPC, but not SLED.

Mike:

Tried beagle.. After one day of indexing the index was already more than one gigabyte and the indexing service was still running. All searches were dead slow. I wonder how it's possible. After all I don't have THAT much data. Lots of source code (few gigabytes) but still...

Panda:

SLED would be nice if it wasn't designed by redhat guys and was built from the ground up - not borrowed, and ran windows apps natively.

anthony M Medina:

Well, have been running beagle on sled10 for a month, have a couple of gigs in my home directory but the beagle index is only 169 megs. You must be indexing the proc filesystem :-)

alan:

For those of us who are stuck with Windows, take a look at Exalead one. The desktop version is free, quite quick, handles the common office file types (and Thunderbird), and, unlike Copernic and X1, has no problem with Cyrillic. Big surprise.