How to turn off Baloo in KDE 4.13?

Question

I have Kubuntu 14.04 and just installed the newest updates. Looking at the process list, I see baloo indexer running.

I could not find a checkbox in Baloo settings to turn off the indexing.

Answer 1

You can make your file manager display hidden files, after which go to $HOME/.kde/share/config/baloofilerc. It is enough to edit it and change the option

Indexing-Enabled=true 

to (or add if there is not such option)

Indexing-Enabled=false

to disable baloo.

I know it is way too easy but it did work for me and also for the guy who posted this simple solution on this page.

Disabling Akonadi server and Nepomuk search plugin can greatly increase performance in a KDE environment.

Answer 2

Baloo is responsible for desktop search.

Quoting one of the Baloo authors:

There is no explicit “Enable/Disable” button any more. We would like to promote the use of searching and feel that Baloo should never get in the users way. However, we are smart about it and IF you add your HOME directory to the list of “excluded folders”, Baloo will switch itself off since it no longer has anything to index.

Answer 3

From the Gentoo forum: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-7522240.html

As of KDE 4.13.0 (Kubuntu Trusty) it is no longer possible to disable Semantic Desktop in the GUI. Though there is a "Desktop Search" applet in the System Settings, and you should be able to blacklist your home dir there, doing so has no effect and Baloo (who has taken over from Nepomuk/Strigi) keeps doing its stuff with 100% load and multi-Gigabyte memory use on the CPU core it runs in.

You may check the CPU load on your system using 'top':

top

Check the I/O load on your system with 'iotop':

sudo apt-get install iotop
sudo iotop

To permanently disable baloo, symlink it to /bin/true:

sudo mv /usr/bin/baloo_file_extractor /usr/bin/baloo_file_extractor.orig
sudo ln -s /bin/true /usr/bin/baloo_file_extractor

and

sudo mv /usr/bin/baloo_file_cleaner /usr/bin/baloo_file_cleaner.orig
sudo ln -s /bin/true /usr/bin/baloo_file_cleaner

This will prevent it from ever running again. Doing so will lose search functionality of course, but does not seem to have any adverse effects beyond that.

Answer 4

To avoid manually editing $HOME/.kde/share/config/baloofilerc, this does the same for you:

kwriteconfig --file baloofilerc --group 'Basic Settings' --key 'Indexing-Enabled' false

Answer 5

I haven't tried it yet, but apparently, you can also do

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

(I had my home folder in the "don't search" section, probably from nepomuk, and baloo_file was still using 100% of a core.)

Answer 6

balooctl

As said here and here, just use:

balooctl disable

BTW, config is now on ~/.config/baloofilerc instead of on ~/.kde/share/config/baloofilerc.

Answer 7

Adding $HOME to the list of excluded paths did stop the baloo_file_extractor, which was using 100% CPU. However it then started baloo_file_cleaner which was trashing my harddisk.

Making sure that it does not autostart, seemed to fix the problems:

sudo mv /usr/share/autostart/baloo_file.desktop /usr/share/autostart/baloo_file.desktop.orig

Answer 8

Though there are a few ways to prevent Baloo from indexing, my intention is to prevent Baloo from even running. As per The KDE docs there is no User-accessible way to do that, so I've combined a solution found on the KDE forums with user 's solution to disable the executables:

sudo mv /usr/bin/baloo_file /usr/bin/baloo_file-orig
sudo ln -s /bin/true /usr/bin/baloo_file
sudo mv /usr/bin/baloo_file_cleaner /usr/bin/baloo_file_cleaner-orig
sudo ln -s /bin/true /usr/bin/baloo_file_cleaner
sudo mv /usr/bin/baloo_file_extractor /usr/bin/baloo_file_extractor-orig
sudo ln -s /bin/true /usr/bin/baloo_file_extractor

I then go a step further and ensure that baloo cannot be updated, overriding the above symlinks:

$ sudo apt-mark hold  baloo libbaloocore4 libbaloofiles4 libbaloopim4 libbaloowidgets4 libbalooxapian4
$ sudo apt-get remove baloo

For additional insurance, if the baloo process ever does find its way back is to add the following to ~/.kde/share/config/baloofilerc:

[Basic Settings]
Indexing-Enabled=false

Answer 9

A post in KDE forums by Aaron Seigo suggests:

qdbus org.kde.baloo.file /indexer suspend

The post is located here: https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=154&t=120047#p304335

Use the following to resume:

qdbus org.kde.baloo.file /indexer resume

Use the following to check is baloo is suspended or not:

qdbus org.kde.baloo.file /indexer isSuspended

TIP: When I type qdbus org.kde.baloo.file /indexer and press Tab multiple times in Kubuntu 14.04 with bash-completion enabled (usually enabled by default), I get a list of commands for baloo.