[SOLVED] FIND=Could not find the 'kf5/kio/filenamesearch' plugin.

[CharlieDaves]

OKAY.
This has happened many times over the last few weeks when I've been trying to get my new motherboard up and running. I have a problem, I uninstall samba, and this error pops up

Unable to create io-slave. klauncher said: Could not find the 'kf5/kio/filenamesearch' plugin.

Q1 What has gone wrong? Where?
Q2 How do I fix it? Reinstall what? please

[CharlieDaves]

I've updated and upgraded and reinstalled dolphin.
I can search withing HOME
but not any other drive

[CharlieDaves]

OKAY Progress.
FYI there is something called kio package, along with kio-extras

[CharlieDaves]

SOLUTION
sudo apt install -f kio-extras

Hey hey. I solved something

[jlittle]

I can search withing HOME
but not any other drive

IIUC this is by design. Dolphin, by default, uses baloo for file search, and it only indexes your home, when it works at all.
<barely restraining rant mode> IMO baloo is broken by design, and has many failure modes that include wearing out SSDs, exceeding their TBW in a few weeks. </rant>

In dolphin you can try "more search tools", and you may find something that suits you there. I use the ancient "locate" mechanism from a bash prompt; that doesn't attempt to search the contents of files.

[CharlieDaves]

IIUC this is by design. Dolphin, by default, uses baloo for file search, and it only indexes your home, when it works at all.
<barely restraining rant mode>

Oh! F-ing great. Index stuff. Lets built another 20 to 100 versions of your files based on tags and what our algorithms tell us. Also useful for marketing purposes.

What about changing file managers? Would this lower your rant mode ?

[GreyGeek]

The locate command is installed via "mlocate" in the repository. Doing "sudo updatedb" updates the database it creates. That command is very fast, as is the locate command. I use it when ever I need to find something by part or all of a filename.

For contents of text files (graphics file contents can't be searched) I use the grep command.

grep -B3 -A4 kill /home/jerry/Documents/IPCC stuff/FOIA_2009/FOIA/mail/*

where "kill" is the word I am searching for.
If I do it within Kate I can search a directory containing 1,000+ text files in a fraction of a second and have the results display in a panel in Kate. Clicking on a line in that panel results in the document being opened in the right bottom panel and the cursor is positioned at that line that contains the search word. (or phrase).
baloo has been (is?) so bad that I uninstall it.

[CharlieDaves]

Didn't ask this
What is baloo?
What does it do?
-What are some better programs, or is ti specifically tied to something like Dolphin for example.
When did it first appear?
and why is it considered "so bad"?
And have wither GreyGeek and Jlittle filed a bug, or change request if it's so bad and there are other things more usefull?

[jlittle]

Didn't ask this
What is baloo? What does it do?

In System Settings, Search, File Search, checking "Enable File Search" starts a subsystem called "baloo" that scans files and builds an index to them. It has the goal of looking into known file formats to allow users to search for files by their content, or by their meta-data if the content isn't very searchable, such as pictures, video, or music. Ideally it runs all the time, scanning new files and rescanning files that change. It's enabled on installing Kubuntu. The index is in ~/.local/share/baloo, and for a typical user should be a few tens of megabytes.

why is it considered "so bad"?

For me the index file would often get corrupted and balloon to hundreds of MB. Sometimes it would consume memory till the OS slowed to a crawl. Sometimes it would get stuck rewriting the index file continuously at the maximum I/O rate of the device it's on, hundreds of MB per second, that's over 8 TB per day, on a device with a warranty of 100 TBW; after I saw that I won't let it run at all. I've seen a report on another tech forum by someone with the same experience.

It's design is that the index is opaque, so one can't fix it, or easily extend it, or diagnose problems. The user doesn't know what file types get scanned, or what data or meta-data are read and stored. IMO that's inherently dubious, if not creepy, and unreliable.

-What are some better programs, or is ti specifically tied to something like Dolphin for example.

I suggest clicking on the search icon in dolphin, then on "More search tools". A selection of tools is shown, usually with links their project's home page. As I previously posted, I haven't used any, and use the ancient locate and find from the command line, and if I want to search file content I use grep; they're not good with meta-data, especially with container formats.

Many bugs have been filed years ago, but because you're not allowed to know what it's doing, all you can report is that "with my data it doesn't work", which would be useless. By design.

[CharlieDaves]

In System Settings, Search, File Search, checking "Enable File Search"

- Would advance search under Dolphin still work if I switch this off?
Kool. Nice knowledge to know of or about Kubuntu. Thanks
It would be nice it others would drop There "IMHO" about Baloo, PLEASE

~/.local/share/baloo

is 1Gb index & 8kb in index.lock file. Rather small for 1Tb main storage ~/Home drive, and an 8TB encrypted storage Drive, and 6Tb

#torrent

Drive.

[claydoh]

Plasma's search has a bad reputation because it it sucked, and sucked HARD, back before approx 2016. And bad perceptions about KDE stick around *forever* (KDE 4.0 anyone?)

I like and use this feature often. I have added extra directories on other drives to be indexed, excluded others, and enabled file indexing for contents. This allows for fast searching of the contents of not only text files, but also pdfs and odf/doc files as well. Obviously this is not a feature everyone will need or use, but it works great for me and has been many years since I have had to even think about it.

I do also use kfind as well, as appropriate.

Disabling the desktop search does not disable the addon seach tools, or at least it didn't use to, when I'd run Plasma on ultra-low spec systems as well as cheap/old Chromebooks, where disabling extras like baloo are rather necessary

[jlittle]

~/.local/share/baloo

is 1Gb index & 8kb in index.lock file. Rather small for 1Tb main storage ~/Home drive, and an 8TB encrypted storage Drive, and 6Tb #torrent Drive.

The overall size of the data is not a very good indicator of the size of the index required. Some files, such as isos or movies, can each have several GB but have only at most few hundred bytes of metadata to be indexed. But text documents (without many pictures), where the text is typically compressed by their format, may generate a lot of terms to be indexed. Can baloo see into databases? Who knows, but I don't think so.

They only way to have any indication whether baloo's index is good is to purge it, then let baloo scan all the data again and see how big the index is. When I was trying to use baloo sometimes an index of hundreds of MB would reduce to ~15 MB after a disable, purge, enable sequence.

[CharlieDaves]

Plasma's search has a bad reputation because it it sucked, and sucked HARD, back before approx 2016. And bad perceptions about KDE stick around *forever* (KDE 4.0 anyone?)

I like and use this feature often. I have added extra directories on other drives to be indexed, excluded others, and enabled file indexing for contents. This allows for fast searching of the contents of not only text files, but also pdfs and odf/doc files as well. Obviously this is not a feature everyone will need or use, but it works great for me and has been many years since I have had to even think about it.

I do also use kfind as well, as appropriate.

Disabling the desktop search does not disable the addon seach tools, or at least it didn't use to, when I'd run Plasma on ultra-low spec systems as well as cheap/old Chromebooks, where disabling extras like baloo are rather necessary

So I can manually add a storage zfs vdev pool to be indexed? If I do add a 12Tb storage pool, does this mean I have to add things like Meta data, Tags, Gene, Artist, year of relese etc?
The "Find" "F3" search also searches the current folder and sub folders (From my experience.

I have wondered about the "advanced" search options, as I could never get it to work. From what has been said in this thread, the "Find" "F3" only searches Baloo Indexed folders & files, and what I've mentioned above. Would this be correct.