Gavin, 30 October 05
With the release of Mandriva 2006 comes a beast called Kat. Now it seems to me, pets always seem to demand attention and cause more problems than you’d anticipated. Kat is no exception.
The theory is great – a cataloguing system running in the background to allow full-text search. It’s something that has created a bit of a buzz following Google Desktop search entering the fold. To be honest it’s something that MS Office always offered to do on systems – though limited to it’s own file-types. Office’s offering was amongst the first things I would switch off in Windows, and sadly Kat has gone the same way.
I tried to get to like it – but it just seemed to adopt all the worst features furry felines possess. It was ready to go away and do it’s own thing – indexing my files with minimum supervision. Buth when things got tough – like hitting my 400Mb mail archive – it whined and eventually brought my system to a crawl. Excluding my Thunderbird data at least let me use the system while the indexer was running.
It ate through memory and CPU usage topped 99% for minutes if not hours. It used some relatively weak attempts to limit it’s appetite by imposing delays on subsequent batches of indexing. It had problems with file names with apostrophes and seemed to give up entirely when indexing my photos on a FAT32 filesystem that was once shared with a Windows boot.
While I am suprised at Mandriva’s decision to include it running by default, I look forward to seeing the Kat return – perhaps when it is more than an untrained kitten.
