zen.org Communal Weblog

I’ve found more often than not my attempts to log into my desktop (which is running Ubuntu Linux) have me staring at a black screen with a white cursor, waiting forever for the login window to come up. It appears this is because an uber-indexer, trackerd, is swallowing up all sorts of CPU time.

There’s no elegant way to disable it. I could kill the process, but that’s only usable until the next time I reboot the system or log off and log back in. So instead I had to do System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager and search for “tracker” (not “trackerd” which doesn’t get it). I right-clicked on tracker, selected Mark for Complete Removal, and clicked Mark to accept that both of the packages libtaskbar-tracker and tracker-search-tool would be getting unistalled too. A click of Apply and then Apply again finally got rid of it. I quit the Synaptic Package Manager, my therapist to help me get away from this constant frustration.

Now if I walk away for more than five minutes, the screen saver will come on…but the idle system won’t give trackerd the ability to work it into the ground, in lieu of any other practical use of the system. Like, say, its user trying to actually use it.