If you followed my recent video tutorial on enabling Ubuntu/GNOME’s Tracker search tool, you should now be enjoying the ability to search the files on your system.

During a recent upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04, which was recently released, I found that the Tracker search tool index had become corrupted. I tried to tell Tracker to rebuild the index, but experienced some weird issues.

In this quick tip, I’ll show you how to avoid this and other issues by deleting Tracker’s index and cache manually, so that it can start ‘from scratch’. Note that if you are having issues with tracker, it is worth trying to rebuild the index from the graphical interface first. This tip is a last resort if you need to clear everything out from scratch and start it again.

Tracker’s Files

According to the documentation, Tracker stores its files in the following locations:

• Configuration Files – ~/.config/tracker/tracker.cfg
• Data Files – ~/.local/share/tracker
• Index Cache – ~/.cache/tracker

If you’re happy with the settings you have, you may want to leave the configuration file intact, and just wipe out the data files and index cache.

Quit Tracker and Delete the Files

First of all, you need to go ahead and quit the Tracker application in the system tray.

Next, you must quit all processes of both trackerd and tracker-indexer, so open up a terminal and run these commands:

And finally, carefully delete the files listed above (excluding the config file, if you don’t think you need to clear that out as well).

So to recap, go ahead and delete the folders:

• ~/.local/share/tracker
• ~/.cache/tracker

and if you wish, the config files:

• ~/.config/tracker/tracker.cfg
• ~/.config/tracker/tracker-applet.cfg

To restart Tracker, I recommend that you log out and log back in so that trackerd and the system tray applet both restart properly. You should then be able to reconfigure it from the beginning as detailed in the original tutorial.

And that should be it – Tracker should rebuild itself from scratch. Useful to know for if things go wrong!

Recently, many larger OEM system builders have started offering a selection of their models with Linux distributions pre-installed. Really big names such as Dell and Lenovo have offered this service.

Unfortunately, DesktopLinux.com reports that Lenovo have pulled out and will no longer offer Linux pre-installs on any of their home-oriented systems.

Lenovo does offer four high-end ThinkStation workstation models without any commercial operating system software, but all of its other systems now carry the "Microsoft Tax," it appears. That is, in order to purchase one of the systems, you have to pay for a Microsoft Windows operating system license.

Lenovo's executive director of external communications, Ray Gorman, denied in vague terms that the current situation marks a strategic shift, though he did admit the company is "refining its Linux strategy." He added, "Lenovo is not abandoning its commitment to choice of operating system, and actually is increasing the role of the Linux operating system in Lenovo's product portfolio."

What they will continue with, however, is offering Linux on a new line of 'netbooks', subcompact notebooks similar to the ubiquitous ASUS Eee PC.

This new netbook form factor will clearly be an important vector for desktop Linux to get to the masses, but this does potentially mean that other manufacturers will follow suit; dropping desktop Linux on traditional desktop and notebook systems to focus on netbooks.

Is it necessary to be pushing desktop Linux to 'real' machines with traditional desktop distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora and the like? Or should we just be glad as a community that the netbook phenomenon will get Linux greater exposure, even if it is only for more cut-down and lightweight systems?

Share your thoughts in the comments.

[via Linux.com, Google Alerts] [image source]

In KDE 3, extracting archives, such as zip and tar files, is pretty simple. You just find the relevant file in Konqueror or Dolphin, right-click it and choose Extract for a list of extraction options.

For some reason, that functionality hasn't been copied over to KDE 4. Now, you must open up Ark for each archive and use the extraction wizard from there.

Extract and Compress KDE4 is a service menu for KDE 4 that restores the right-click extract functionality and once again makes it simple and quick to extract archive files. It also restores the functionality to make archives from the right-click menu.

Go ahead and download the tar.gz file from the website and extract it (yes, using the slow method this last time).

Double-click install.sh in this folder to start the installation of the service menu.

You will first be asked whether to perform this installation for just your user, or for the whole system. Choose whatever you prefer - obviously you can only do the whole system if you have the administrator rights and the right password.

You'll be asked for the password if necessary and then a folder selection box will come up. Here, you have to select the directory to install in, which must be where your KDE 4 service menus are stored.

On my Kubuntu 8.04 system, the right place for all users is /usr/lib/kde4/share/kde4/services/, so I choose that folder in the selector.

To find out where your service menu directories are, you can run this command in a terminal:

$ kde4-config --path services

That will spit out a list of the directories you can install in, separated by colons (:). In most cases there will be two entries, one in your home folder and one elsewhere. Choose the one in your home folder if you're doing a single user install, or the other one for all users.

Once you know the right directory to install in, choose it in the folder selector dialogue and click OK to install.

The program will now disappear for a few seconds while it installs, so have a little patience until you are notified the install is done.

That's it, the new service menu for extracting and compressing files is installed. You will need to close and re-open any applications, such as Dolphin and Konqueror, before the new options will show up in the right-click menu.