Medusa is software that allows you to quickly search your system for
particular types of files, using an index.

CAVEATS
-------

Medusa is still in its early stages.  It is not yet feature complete,
and there are known bugs, some of which can take up lots of
unnecessary resources on your machine.

Please do not use this code on an afs system or over nfs volumes; the
file permissions are not compatible with medusa.  Running
medusa on these systems is completely insecure.

As of Nautilus 2.x and higher does not work with Medusa 6.x.  Nautilus will
attempt to compile with it by default.  Undefine "HAVE_MEDUSA" if you wish to
build Nautilus while Medusa is installed.

HOW TO BUILD MEDUSA
--------------------

Medusa can be installed in many places, but the gnome-vfs module must be 
installed where in the sysconfdir where 'gnome-vfs-2.0/modules' are located.  In
many distributions that come with gnome this is '/etc'.  If you compiled gnome
yourself, be sure to set the sysconfdir as you set it to build gnome-vfs.

To make and install medusa, do the following from within
the medusa source directory, taking care to set the prefix and sysconfdir path
for your environment:

./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc
make 
make install 
(do the last step as root if you are installing to a
place where you do not have write permission)


RUNNING MEDUSA ON YOUR SYSTEM
-----------------------------

You should have at least 64, and preferably at least 96 megs
of RAM to run the indexer.  Removable media will also be indexed by
medusa, so remove CDs, zip drives, and floppies before indexing.

Medusa's indexes will be created in proportion to the amount of data
on your hard drive.  In general the size of the indexes will be
between 0.25-5% of the size of all of the data on your computer, so be
sure you have enough free space to make the indexes before running
medusa.

After the indexer is finished, it will print a message to stdout,
telling you that this is the case.


To start the indexing process, run

medusa-indexd

Let it keep running, and wait for it to finish indexing.  You can force
the indexer to run faster, and take up more CPU by running

medusa-indexd --without-idle-checks

After the indexer is complete you can perform searches.
This can be done by using the "search" feature in Nautilus,
msearch-gui, or by using the command line testing tool "msearch"

For documentation about the command line tool, see the file
docs/how_to_use_msearch.  It is possible that this file is slightly
out of date.

CONFIGURING MEDUSA ON YOUR SYSTEM
---------------------------------

Because indexing the contents of your machine each night can
be expensive, Medusa by default does not run a nightly indexing process.
You can turn on a nightly indexing process adding it to your crontab 
(see the crontab manual for details).

Medusa's setting are in GConf.  You can use gconf-editor to edit the keys
in /apps/medusa. 'file-index-stoplist' contains a list of paths that will be 
ignored by the indexer.  Each path may have wildcard and joker ('*' many and 
'?' one) to match similar paths.  For instance '*cache*' will mactch any file 
or directory that has 'cache' in its name.  'mount-type-stoplist' is a list
of filesystem types.   It can be used to prevent Medusa from index network 
shares.


REPORTING BUGS
--------------

Medusa bugs can be reported using the gnome bug report tool, which is
located at bugzilla.bugzilla.  Report bugs for the "medusa"
component.

Bug reports that occur during the use of Nautilus should be reported
using the Nautilus bug report tool if possible, but can also be
reported using bugzilla.

You can send email regarding medusa to chovey@gnome.org or rebecka@eazel.com.


MEDUSA FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
---------------------------------

1.  How is medusa different than slocate?

Medusa is able to find files by their names quickly.  However, medusa
is also able to find files by their path, size, content, and owner, or
in any combination.

2.  Indexing takes a long time!  When will this get better?

Indexing your whole drive does take a long time, and we hope to
improve this as much as possible.  To some degree, however, 
this is a byproduct of the slowness of hard drives.
However, we hope to introduce "incremental" indexing soon, so
that files will only get reindexed when they are altered after
the last indexing.

3.  I get compilation errors: undefined reference to 
    `medusa_idle_service_sleep_until_idle'

Automake 1.7.6 doesn't make the static libraries correctly.  The 
linker cannot locate the medusa-idled client lib for libmedusa-private.
upgrade automake to fix the problem.

