8

I have a SSD for my root partition and use a HDD under /data/ and use system links in my home directory for file heavy directories such as:

/data/home/user/Documents > linked to /home/user/Documents
/data/home/user/Downloads > linked to /home/user/Downloads
etc.

In Ubuntu 17.10, GNOME does not follow these system links when indexing files for GNOME Search. It only seems to index files/dirs which are located below /home/user/.

Screenshot:

screnshot search settings

I'm trying to figure out how to index files in other directories, so they show up in GNOME Search. I would assume I would be able to add custom directories within the search settings. I've also been looking around in dconf but cannot find anything.

wittich
  • 1,214
Ace
  • 81

3 Answers3

3

Heh, actually the configuration wizard does exist, but by default it's not installed by Ubuntu (as of 17.10). You have to install "tracker" and maybe a couple other applets (?), look for it in synaptic.

mahen
  • 276
3

This should help you:

gsettings get org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files index-recursive-directories
gsettings get org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files index-single-directories

On GUI you can edit them with dconf-editor.

Did you try activating this?

gsettings set org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files index-removable-devices true
Pablo Bianchi
  • 17,371
DMT
  • 864
0

Another piece of the problem: Gnome Shell doesn't include results from drives other than the one your home directory is on. So tracker may find your files, and Gnome will still ignore them.

You'll need to bind (rather than symlink) the directory into your home directory:

cd ~/
mkdir ./searchdirectory
sudo mount --bind /some/directory ./searchdirectory

or make it permanent with an fstab entry:

/some/directory /home/youruser/searchdirectory none bind 0 0

See this for more details: https://superuser.com/questions/1260226/gnome-activities-search-does-not-show-most-files

And you'll probably need to do a tracker reset -f DIR_NAME to pick up the changes.

Steven Bell
  • 311