Find in Dolphin does not work, Baloosearch possibly to blame

[Spectrum]

Hi!

I have the same problem as described in this thread: "Find" in Dolphin no longer works. [baloosearch?]. "Find" in Dolphin never finds anything. It displays "baloosearch" in the header, suggesting that Baloo is the culprit.

The thread is for Kubuntu 14.04. I am in 18.04. One person solved it by running this:

$ qdbus org.kde.baloo.file /indexer updateAllFolders false

This command gives me an error:

Cannot find '.updateAllFolders' in object /indexer at org.kde.baloo.file

Does anyone know how to proceed - either fix Baloo or get Dolphin to search without Baloo?

Thanks!

[Don B. Cilly]

Personally, I would ditch baloo and use command-line locate, find, etc.

[Spectrum]

Personally, I would ditch baloo and use command-line locate, find, etc.

I don't want to be limited to just the command line. I want to be able to use Dolphin because Dolphin synergizes nicely with other applications (e.g. Gwenview).

[vinnywright]

it works hear .

have you checked in system settings>search and make sure you have it on ?

+ you can run "balooctl check" to check the database and check for un-indexed files .

VINNY

[jglen490]

I'm going to give you the least possible useful answer. Mine works, balooctl status shows file have been indexed.

Apparently, at least here, baloo isn't the a****le it used to be.

[Flavio R. Cavalcanti]

I am late, and possibly your problem is already solved?

I can think 2 possible reasons:

1) Sometimes, Dolphin does not work fine after an upgrade, because the (old) version that was opened before upgrade depended on some packages which version is now different. In such cases, I have to relaunch Dolphin, or even reboot.

CTRL-F works fine, here, within 11 distros, and had worked fine within many others, last years.

Usually, I have these 5 packages:

baloo-kf5
libkf5baloo5
libkf5balooengine5
libkf5baloowidgets-bin
libkf5baloowidgets5:amd64

For Advanced search, you may also install KFind ─ it may be used alone, but it also adds an Advanced option to Dolphin search.

Usually, I remove other baloo* packages, and also most of PIM ─ including +/- 16 Akonadi packages. ─ They don't miss just to CTRL-F in Dolphin (for filename or content) nor to KFind files by name, content, range of time, owner and so on.

And I use to disable System settings > Search > Filesearch, too. ─ It doesn't miss just to CTRL-F in Dolphin nor to KFind.

[Spectrum]

Thanks for the replies. Inspired by your suggestions I found two potential problems:

1. Under System Settings -> Search -> File Search I had some folders explicitly excluded. I removed those from the blacklist. Now it looks like this:



2. I ran balooctl config list includeFolders and found that Baloo was only indexing my home directory (/home/spectrum). And true enough, Dolphin-Find does work in my home directory. But I have most of my files outside my home directory.

So I tried to add some folders using balooctl config add includeFolders <path>. Now, when I run balooctl config list includeFolders I see these folders showing up.

It still doesn't make any difference, though. I can search in my home directory, but not in the other folders I've tried to include. Moreover, it doesn't look as though the Baloo File Indexer is lifting a finger. It says:

$ balooctl status
Baloo File Indexer is running
Indexer state: Idle
Indexed 43 / 43 files
Current size of index is 2,14 MiB
$

This is the same as what it said before. balooctl check does nothing. A reboot does nothing.

Does anyone know what I need to do to make Baloo get off its lazy butt and do its work?

[Spectrum]

Update: Now it started working! I don't know what changed. Is the indexer just really slow to detect new files to index? At least, its file count was not moving when I called balooctl check and balooctl status a couple of times 10 minutes ago.

Hm. I guess it is OK now. But I wish I knew what went on.

[vinnywright]

Update: Now it started working! I don't know what changed. Is the indexer just really slow to detect new files to index? At least, its file count was not moving when I called balooctl check and balooctl status a couple of times 10 minutes ago.

Hm. I guess it is OK now. But I wish I knew what went on.

Baloo can be , quiet , you may not know it's doing anything , so I find it's nice to have a konsole open and running top so I can see it's their and doing something .

VINNY

[jlittle]

Update: Now it started working! I don't know what changed. Is the indexer just really slow to detect new files to index? ...But I wish I knew what went on.

Me too; baloo seems very poorly documented. I got annoyed that it wasn't looking in .config and .local, and googled hard to find out why. It should be quite possible to dump out its index. The daemon has an API which I presume is documented somewhere (the term "API" seems to imply such exists) that google did not find, just way out of date stuff on the KDE community wiki. Maybe the problems people had with baloo (myself included; I had a corrupt index that caused very bad behaviour by the baloo file indexer, consuming memory, cpu, and storage to exhaustion) has swamped google. It doesn't help that there's another software project called baloo.

Using balooctl index .config worked after a couple of minutes, in that dolphin could find ~/.config/baloofilerc if searching for baloo.

[chimak111]

It should be quite possible to dump out its index.

The closest I could get is with "strings index > ~/Desktop/strings.txt". That gave me a 22MB file which Geany gagged on but ultimately opened. I'm not sure it provides you with what you want.

I seem to remember someone somewhere mentioning the actual tool but I've forgotten

[chimak111]

I think it's something to do with lmdb.

[jlittle]

I think it's something to do with lmdb.

(Fooled again by a non-serif font. Wasted time looking through google hits on the movie database.)

Thank you, it is indeed a Lightning Memory-Mapped Database. Unfortunately, there's a dearth of tools that will allow exploration of the data; there's only language bindings. Not even a way to list stuff. The mdb_dump command looked promising but it uses some awful "\00" delimited format.

[chimak111]

(Fooled again by a non-serif font. Wasted time looking through google hits on the movie database.)

That's why I prefer serif and even fixed-width fonts. The movie hits really polluted that search for me.

I found https://vhanda.in/blog/2015/10/baloo-5-15/ which also mentions LMDB.

For those interested in baloo-related issues, there's https://phabricator.kde.org/search/q...mDyjRWlFIFt/#R

Looks like a developer of LMDB is participating here: https://phabricator.kde.org/T9805

[tictactux]

Hi Everyone,

I had the same problem. I have solved it by removing "baloo" and "kfind" as a last "disabling desktop search". Than All will be work with "find" totally as expected!

Some commands which will help you to get rid of some error notifications from KDEdesktop:

balooctl stop
balooctl disable
rm -rf .local/share/baloo/

cheers <B-)