Maybe I'm as thick as a brick but I can't do searches in Gnome

[GravityOnAutomatic]

And I really can't figure out why. I'm using the latest version of Ubuntu with Gnome. Basically if I go to Places-->Computer (the file browser opens) and double click on the filesystem icon, I get a list of everything on this system right? The very first directory is 'bin'. So if I click the search icon and type in 'bin' it will return 0 hits. In fact if I do a search for anything I know is already there I will get no matches. The only time the search feature works is if I do a search in my own home folder. I do have read permission for the filesystem so I should be able to do a search there. Can anyone help?

[bigtomrodney]

Are you using Beagle search? If so it by default only indexes your home directory. You can change it to index other places too but bare in mind that you don't have permissions to read a lot of the system so it may not be what you are looking for. Then again outside of your home directory should really only contain system files

If you need to run occasional system wide search and aren't afraid of the command line look into findutils. You get something that is similar to Beagle but holds a static database which you only manually update when you decide.

 su -
updatedb
locate something

[GravityOnAutomatic]

Then again outside of your home directory should really only contain system files


Really? So even apps are located in the /home folder? So if another user wanted to use FireFox for example, they would have to do a separate fresh install. The whole reason I'm confused by this is cause I went looking for the FF executable file so I could upgrade to 2.0.