Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Interview: Roberto Cappuccio of KAT

Filed under
KDE
Interviews
-s

Kat Desktop Search Environment is an open source framework designed to allow KDE applications to index and retrieve files; loosely speaking, a search tool. Tuxmachines has had the rare opportunity to speak with Roberto Cappuccio, wonderfully talented developer of KAT.

Roberto is a 38 year old student in Bolzano, Italy, working on his Master of Science degree. Previously a software consultant for his own company, he is now the System Administrator of the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of Bozen-Bolzano. He's not married, but he is in a committed relationship, gals.

According to the website, Kat is similar to the Windows applications WhereIsIt and Google Desktop Search. Metadata, fulltext and thumbnails are extracted from documents, images, mp3 and other media allowing quick and accurate information retrieval.

Also being featured on kde-apps.org, one can find a quick howto, brief changelog and more screenshots of this wonderful utility there. svn is available here.

As you might recall, KAT now ships with MandrivaLinux and the index tool is present by default in the system tray on their 2006 desktops. In addition, Roberto states that Kubuntu ships with KAT and "Debian is evaluating the possibility of including Kat in Etch."

        



TM: I notice a few distros are shipping with Beagle, how is yours different? better?

Roberto: From a technical point of view:
Beagle is a Gnome application, written in C# (and another 2 or 3 languages), using the MONO library and lucene. Kat is a KDE application, written in C++, using KDE and KIO libraries, using and extending the KDE architecture.

From a functional point of view:
Beagle is only a Desktop Search engine, like Google desktop search. Kat technology will be used as a base for the Context Linking engine of KDE called Tenor. This means that we index files and content like Beagle, but then we go beyond this and link the items based on their context.

The result is: better and more accurate search.

TM: What distro do you run most of the time? favorite distro?

Roberto: Debian SID, but right now I'm using Kubuntu, which is more user friendly.

TM: When did you first start using linux, what was your first experience, why when what etc?

Roberto: I have always been a Windows power user. I tried Linux a lot of times during the past years but I found it terribly unstable and mostly unusable. Six months ago I had to do an assignment for a course in Data Mining and it had to be done in C++ in Linux. So I armed myself with patience and discovered Debian. That project has become Kat.

TM: Are you actively involved in other open source projects, what if any, are some of your other projects?

Roberto: Yes, I will collaborate with the Tenor team in order to create the new Search Engine for KDE, which will incorporate also Contextual Linking.

TM: Why KAT?

Roberto: It is a word joke. It creates catalogs, it is developed for KDE (and you know that almost all KDE apps have a name beginning with K), so it should have been called Katalog, but an application with that name already exists... So I contracted it to Kat. I love cats (I have always had cats around), so the similarity between Kat and cat made the rest. I also designed Kat logo.

TM: What's in the future for KAT?

Roberto: Kat will remain an application on its own as long as we manage to merge it with Tenor. Then it will survive inside of Tenor, as the Content Search layer.

TM: Would you like to say hi or anything to anyone? Or do you have a message you'd like published?

Roberto: I'm searching for a sponsorship from a big software company, like the one Trolltech offered to Aaron Seigo. I need to work a lot to Kat and Tenor, but I also have to work for my university. If I could get a sponsorship, the evolution of Kat could be much more quick.

Tuxmachines found Roberto to be an extremely nice and accessible developer, and very much enjoyed doing the research on this wonderful application for this article. I encourage everyone who desires a comprehensive search utility to install and use Kat. Visit the home of Kat and look for Kat in the upcoming release of Mandriva 2006.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.