Linux

Disable tracker in Gnome if you do not need it

9 April 2019 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

According to its website, “Tracker is a filesystem indexer, metadata storage system and search tool.”

“By using Tracker, you no longer have to remember where you’ve left your files. To locate a file you only need to remember something about it, such as a word in the document or the artist of the song. This is because as well as searching for files in the traditional way, by name and location, Tracker searches files’ contents and metadata.”

That’s great I guess for some people.

For me, Tracker is a massive pain as I have a lot of files, some of them huge and a lot of them being binary files (think images and photos, music files, videos, LibreOffice files, PDF documents, etc.) On my Fedora Linux installation, which is now running in a virtual machine on a brand new MacBook Pro, the Tracker extractor and indexer uses a lot of CPU resources. Too much in fact for something that I never ever use.

You see, I am an “informatician” (i.e. a computer scientist — a very bad designation — think calling a surgeon a scalpel scientist) and, as such, I make it a must to properly save all my files in folders and subfolders. I also name the files very consistently with dates, sensible use of words, etc. for proper sorting and, hence, searching.

So I don’t need Tracker as I pretty much can narrow down to the single file I need in a few seconds.

How to disable Tracker in Gnome

I found the following set of commands online which disable Tracker:

    gsettings set org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files enable-monitors false

    gsettings set org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files ignored-files "['*']"

    gsettings set org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files crawling-interval -2

Looking at the source code of Tracker, the -2 indicates that Tracker should be disabled. The next step is to kill all current Tracker processes:

    pkill tracker

and, finally, clear the Tracker cache

    rm -rf ~/.cache/tracker

Playing Quake again after 23 years

4 April 2019 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

Quake was born when Christina and I were studying in France in 1996.

Like most people we knew, we fell in love with the game: the graphics were amazing (and we even bought a 3dfx Voodoo 2 to run it), the audio was great and the atmosphere phenomenal. As a matter of fact, Quake is one of the few games I completed. I ran it on Windows 95.

Fast forward 23 years

Today, my laptop runs Fedora Linux 29 and I only use its integrated Intel graphics chipset (despite the laptop having an nVidia chipset as well). This morning, I stumbled upon Quaddicted:

From there, I quickly discovered that, since Quake was released as open source software in 2012, a number of people have embarked on correcting bugs and enhancing the Quake engine. According to Quaddicted (and who am I to disagree!), the best engine for Linux is Quakespasm.

I quickly downloaded it and found an executable called quakespasm-sdl2 which I quickly ran. I got an error message telling me that a folder id1 was not found.

I remembered having zipped my Quake installation years and years ago and, because I am a very methodical guy, took only 5 seconds to find the ZIP. It had the id1 folder in it which I quickly copied to the Quakespasm folder. I got the Quake music. I ran quakespasm-sdl2 again and, lo and behold, Quake started in all its glory. I quickly selected the full screen option and opened a save game from decades ago and it worked! This is what you can see in the top screenshot.

But quake is more than quake…

While reading Quaddicted, a stumbled upon Quake Injector, a tool written in Java which allows you to easily download and run 3rd party maps in Quake. Think maps as levels, distinct from the Quake default levels, but as great and sometimes greater to play.

[Caveat: Quake Injector did not run at first as I had Java 11 on my Linux laptop. I had to switch to Java 8 (which I also had but was inactive)]

As soon as Quake Injector started, I installed the very highly rated DaMaul6 map and this is where I am now. Wish me luck as DaMaul6 is known to be very difficult.

A journey from Unison to Syncthing and back to Unison

29 March 2019 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

I generally work on my laptop, an old Dell Inspiron 15 still running Fedora Linux 29 quite well. At home, I also tend to work on an Apple iMac (still) running macOS El Capitan (which I intend to upgrade to High Sierra soon — unfortunately, Apple has decided that this iMac cannot run Mojave).

Since the very beginning, I needed to have a proper file synchronisation process for these two computers and cloud solutions such as Google Drive or Dropbox were not options as I had many many Gigabytes to synchronise and this would have been very expensive to be done online.

For 1-2 years, I used Unison, a file synchronisation utility written by one of my Computer Science heroes, Benjamin Pierce, author of the quite renowned book “Types and Programming Languages” which, I have to confess, I have not yet read because, well, I never had the chance to stumble upon it. Anyway, Unison is a tool which does two-way synchronisation between computers and every time there is an inconsistency (a new file, a deleted file, a change, etc.) ask the user to manually choose on the action to make. One important of Unison is that one has to run it manually i.e. the synchronisation only happens when initiated by the user. For example, I like to run Unison every afternoon when I get back home after one day of work.

One year ago, I stopped using Unison. The reason was that I wanted to have real time synchronisation between the two computers i.e. as soon as one changes, the other one is updated (if on of course.) I settled on Syncthing. I tried two different ways of using Syncthing (with a central repository or in peer-to-peer mode) and both worked as expected. But after one year, I have to say that I have two issues with Syncthing. First of all, changes are detected through the inotify mechanism provided by Linux and the macOS kernel. As soon as a file is changed, Syncthing knows about it and can propagate the change to the other computer. All good in principle. But this also means that all errors (a file deleted by mistake, a file overwritten by mistake, etc.) are also immediately propagated. So I used different kinds of versioning techniques to make sure that backups are kept in these situations. But, nevertheless, I slowly realised that real-time propagation might not be a good idea. The second issue is that Syncthing uses a lot of CPU.

Two days ago, I stopped the Syncthing service on all my computers and revived my Unison installation. And, believe it or not, Unison works great for my use case: I can synchronise my computers when I want (after work for instance) and I have the possibility (if there are incoherences) to think deep about which version to keep. For me, and because my files are very valuable to me, this is a much better process.

[At this point, let me point out that I use Unison for synchronisation and I use regular rsync for backup on other devices. It is important to understand the difference between these two processes. Synchronisation is not always needed but backups definitely. Especially when it is compliant with the 3-2-1 strategy.]

What about you? What do you use for synchronising multiple computers when cloud synchronisation is not possible? Do you use Unison? Syncthing? Something else? Why?