You know what the worst thing is about having incredibly cheap storage technology? You find endless excuses to be a digital packrat. I didn't need to have an excuse before; I've just saved everything anyway, compulsively. What I've always needed is some way to plow through it all -- a magnet for the needles in my haystack -- and now Google has once again come to the rescue with a version of their Desktop Search product for Linux.

I've been wildly curious about the Linux edition of Google Desktop Search for a lot of reasons. After setting up not just one but several different Linux machines (Ubuntu 7.04 here, Kubuntu 7.04 there, Damn Small Linux over yonder), I've been looking for ways to reproduce certain Windows behaviors. One was something I got badly spoiled on in Windows Vista -- the indexed search system -- and which I wanted to also have available on my Linux boxes. There are indexed search systems for Linux already available -- Beagle's the one I've had the most exposure to -- and I wanted to see how Google Desktop Search (GDS) stacked up against them and the Windows / Mac versions. The answer, from what I can tell so far: It stacks up pretty well.

First, the setup. When you visit http://desktop.google.com/linux, you'll see a download link that leads you to two possibilities: an .rpm package for Red Hat / Fedora / Suse / Mandriva users, or a .deb package for Debian / Ubuntu folks. It's also possible to install Desktop Search from a repository: graphical installers for Ubuntu, Debian and openSUSE are all supported, along with command-line installation for APT, YUM, urpmi, YaST2, and RPM. Finally, if you want to get the source code to the project itself, Google states you can browse the Subversion repository for the project, although when I tried to do that I found nothing but empty directories (I suspect that's because I'm not a project member).

After I snagged the .deb installer package and saved it to my desktop, getting it installed was equally painless; I just ran the package manager, and then logged out and back in again. That part's required to allow the desktop components to load up. Again, as with Windows, a Google Desktop Search icon sits in the system tray (which in Ubuntu is at the top by default); you can double-click it to launch a search interface in a web browser or tap the Ctrl key twice to bring up a quick search box.

As with the other versions of Google Desktop Search, you access the vast majority of the program's settings through a Web browser, and you can also run searches from there. There's a lot of other functions that I haven't even gotten my feet wet with yet -- the file versioning, the integration with Gmail, and how the indexer handles things like metadata as well as file contents -- but I'll dig into those in the weeks to come. I'm dying to see how this thing copes with my 100GB of (legit) music files.