I’m the maintainer of Beagle, and I wanted to let you know about how it works after I came across this entry.

There are two parts: one is a system-wide crawler which builds indexes for all the users to use. This is done through the beagle-crawl-system tool run by cron. You can find its entry in /etc/cron.daily. You can simply remove it if you don’t want it to crawl your applications and documentation.

The other part is a per-user daemon that’s started when you log in. This indexes your personal data and is the piece that actually does the searches when they’re requested. You can turn this off too by running the “beagle-settings” program, going to the “Search Settings” control panel in the GNOME control center, or going to Search -> Preferences in the search tool itself and unchecking the “Start search & indexing services automatically” checkbox. If you’re not interested in search at all, though, for any users, you can simply remove (or not install) the package.

If you have any other questions about Beagle, how it fits into openSUSE, or whatever, feel free to email me.

Thanks,
Joe