I remember a release when tracker was one of the innovations of Ubuntu. What happened to it?
Best Answer
Metatracker, usually referred to as Tracker, was introduced in 8.04 (an LTS release), but removed, I believe, in 9.04. I can only speculate as to why it was removed, but my guess would be multiple bugs, such as 100% CPU when the tracker daemon failed, or the slow start up on less powerful systems due to the indices updating.
I run it on my system and haven't noticed any slow downs, but my laptop is reasonably powerful.
Tracker is a search engine and metadata store that indexes your files to do all sorts of interesting things. See this answer for some usage basics.
It hasn't been installed by default in Ubuntu since Ubuntu 9.04; you must have installed it inadvertently. If you'll not be using it, you can remove it by removing the "tracker" package.
I know this is not really about tracker, but looking at your workflow (and thus answering an underlying question), I would definitely recommend taking a look at Mendeley. It's a scientific reference and literature database software, advanced search, full text search, tagging, annotating pdf's, automatic .bib files etc. It's what I use for managing my thesis' literature, and I love it.
Edit: Since this post was written, Mendeley sold (out) to Elsevier. An open-source alternative is Zotero.
Best Answer
Metatracker, usually referred to as Tracker, was introduced in 8.04 (an LTS release), but removed, I believe, in 9.04. I can only speculate as to why it was removed, but my guess would be multiple bugs, such as 100% CPU when the tracker daemon failed, or the slow start up on less powerful systems due to the indices updating.
I run it on my system and haven't noticed any slow downs, but my laptop is reasonably powerful.