Can't stop/remove baloo

Bug #1295323 reported by hyper_ch
88
This bug affects 18 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
baloo (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Undecided
Unassigned
kde-baseapps (Ubuntu)
Invalid
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

I use Kubuntu 14.04 and with todays updates I suddenly got Baloo indexer. However I can't remove it as it also wants to remove Dolphin and other stuff. IMHO that's bad because Dolphin shouldn't be dependant on a file indexer.

Furthermore I didn't find a way in the Baloo gui to disable it - this is also bad design IMHO as not everybody wishes to index their files.

Tags: bot-comment
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Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton) wrote :

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

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tags: added: bot-comment
affects: ubuntu → kde-baseapps (Ubuntu)
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Harald Sitter (apachelogger) wrote :

Press CTRL+F in dolphin, that's why it depends on baloo.

Changed in kde-baseapps (Ubuntu):
status: New → Invalid
Revision history for this message
hyper_ch (bugs-launchpad-net-roleplayer) wrote :

Still, there's a second problem: How to deactivate/disable baloo?

Control -> Configure in Dolphin doesn't show a way to disable it. Neither does the KDE systemsettings have an entry.

Revision history for this message
Nizamov Shawkat (nizamov-shawkat) wrote :

According to https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1391494 there are two ways of disabling baloo:

1) Add your home folder to the list of not indexed folders in the Desktop Search KCM (System Settings -> Desktop Search)

2)
$ cp /usr/share/autostart/baloo_file.desktop ~/.kde/share/autostart/
$ echo "Hidden=True" >> ~/.kde/share/autostart/baloo_file.desktop

I did not like the first option because the addition of paths is somewhat broken. The second seems to work better - after restart I do not see baloo among running processes.

Revision history for this message
Tom Chiverton (bugs-launchpad-net-falkensweb) wrote :

Either the hard dependencies in tools people need like Dolphin need removing (after all, what is DBus for ?) so people who don't need the ability to tag files (hint, everyone - why was Nepomuk a dead duck ?) can ininstall Baloo, or there needs to be a trivial way to disable it (like with Akondi).

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Mark Fraser (launchpad-mfraz) wrote :

I tried using the second method in comment 4, but I still have akonadi_baloo_indexer running and it means that I have to use KMail on its own to read email rather that integrated within Kontact.

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Alex (alexzkhr) wrote :

sudo dpkg -r --force-depends baloo

killed it. However it may rise again, if it will happen, I'm going to make fake baloo package with version like 999 and install it.

P.S. Fun is ... even playing 3D games on i7 looks like "idle" and this stupid baloo uses HDD so much...so my mouse pointer is hard to move :/

Revision history for this message
Alex (alexzkhr) wrote :
  • deb.deb Edit (642 bytes, application/x-debian-package)

Not sure If it's right place to upload packages... but some people may come here from google. So .. when baloo is killed as in post above, dpkg will demand to restore it stopping any updates.

So here is empty deb file which contains only version number 99 - it fixes packages' depends.

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Changed in baloo (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
hyper_ch (bugs-launchpad-net-roleplayer) wrote :

@NIzamov

Thx... I used the second way and that really seems to work with setting Hidden=True

Revision history for this message
Sergio Callegari (callegar) wrote :

This looks like a bug with upstream.
Again, kde appears to be pushing an half-finished tool without passing through a phase where only early adopters can try it.

I see the following issues:

1) No discoverable interface to switch the indexer off (adding your home to the exclude file list is less than intuitive)
2) When you add something to the exclude list, the database does not reduce in size. This wastes space and poses privacy issue. You may think that you have deleted something, but it may still live in the database.
3) By default the database seems to be readable by everybody on the system! This is a security hazard. If you have passwords in a file readable only by yourself, other users may be able to read your passwords by snooping into the database.
4) There is no tool to check what is indexed and what is not and to manually remove stuff from the database.
5) There is no nice interface to selectively decide what to index (typically, one may want to exclude home, but for a couple of dirs)

Can this be reported upstream?

Once finished baloo may turn out to be a nice tool. Getting rid of the virtuoso/strigi/nepomuk stuff seems a great idea. Having tags live with files as attributes rather than on a database also seems a good idea. But right now it seems really immature.

Revision history for this message
Harald Sitter (apachelogger) wrote :

> Can this be reported upstream?

Here you can https://bugs.kde.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Baloo&format=guided

Revision history for this message
Tyler Schmidt (tylergschmidt) wrote :

There is an upstream bug to turn Baloo off. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=332195 There are other related Baloo bugs related to the IO performance issues. Comment 11 is spot on. I would add 6) (K)ubuntu packages should be built without Baloo as a dependency. I removed Baloo for the reasons listed, and it took Gwenview, Dolphin, Kmail, and others along with it. That's a different bug, however.

Revision history for this message
Gregor Rebel (gregor-k) wrote :

This will do the job and reclaim lots of hard disc space:

sudo rm -f /usr/share/autostart/baloo_file.desktop
sudo rm -f /usr/bin/*baloo*
sudo find /home/ -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d -exec rm -Rfv {}/.local/share/baloo \;
sudo killall -9 akonadi_baloo_indexer

Revision history for this message
Julius Schwartzenberg (jschwart) wrote :

I've disabled baloo here, but I still have a .local/share/baloo/ which takes up 14GB (out of 240GB total). It's strange that Dolphin (also containing Konqueror's filemanaging kparts) is depending on baloo.

Revision history for this message
hyper_ch (bugs-launchpad-net-roleplayer) wrote :

I currently use the Kubuntu Team PPAs and in there you can finally remove Ballo and stuff :)

Revision history for this message
Lenin (gagarin) wrote :

#19 path for this changed: /etc/xdg/autostart/baloo_file.desktop

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