Google released it's desktop search for Linux a couple of days ago. Google desktop search is something I was hoping for for some time for my Linux installation as I am not hundred percent happy with the alternatives. Until now I have been using Beagle Search but never really got it to play nice with my Thunderbird mails. Here is hoping that Google does a better job.

First up installation:

Installation is a snap especially for Ubuntu users as Google provides a custom package for installation on Ubuntu systems . Easy to follow installation instructions can be found here: http://www.google.com/linuxrepositories/ubuntu704.html

Some problems I had:

Could not use the preference pages. (Pages not showing)

Clicking links on the Google Desktop Preferences pages were breaking, and Firefox would show a page not found error. The URL would show the page being retrieved from KDE Cache or something along those lines.

Solution:

This was a problem with KDE, the resolution was to launch Firefox with the suffix %U, (e.g. firefox %U) I also did the same for the launch script for Thunderbird. This fixed the problem and the preferences screens now work as expected.

Googledesktop was not indexing Thunderbird mails or Firefox Websites.

Solution:

Both Firefox and Thunderbird need extensions (add/ons) for them to work with googledesktop,
on a standard installation this is taken care of by the package installer. However I manually installed the latest version of Firefox and Thunderbird by hand, so the extensions did not get installed. The installer can be found in the google desktop binary folder.

On my installation this was in:

/opt/googledesktop/bin

The installation scripts can be started with command line parameters which point to a custom installation. In my case I executed the following commands, and voila everything is working nice.

Note: I have installed Firefox and Thunderbird in a apps folder within my home directory.