HOW TO INSTALL CATFISH FILE SEARCH APP (NON-SNAP PKG) IN UBUNTU 24.04

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RANT (or skip and go straight to HOW TO...below)

I love Catfish, the search engine, and I use it extensively, especially when I need to search an attached USB drive (MyPassport) for content text, which cannot be done in Files (Nautilus) on an Ubuntu machine (despite the promises of the OS 24.04 release). When 24.04 was released, I decided to forego my umpteenth Upgrade and do the “full monty” fresh install.

After the install, I was totally dismayed and very irritated to discover that virtually all the programs I run were now available only as snaps, not only in the initial install, but post-install in the Software Center. Worse, unlike the Software Center in the previous version, which clearly indicated (and gave you a choice) whether it was a snap or repository package, Ubuntu sneakily and without customer input removed all packages from their repositories and made them available only as snaps—and at that, they don’t even indicate in the SC that they are snaps, so initially I wound up installing several packages from the SC, then had to go back, uninstall them, then find the Terminal install instructions for each package...the more I think and talk about it, the angrier I become.

Anyhow, Catfish was one of those bait-and-switch (best pun ever, no?) programs in the SC that I definitely did not want to run as a snap, tut was tricked into installing as a snap. After I used the Terminal to uninstall the Snap, I did the following. (Another maddening thought: Unless I allow myself to be held captive by often inferior or non-working snap packages, I will be forced to update all the non-snap packages manually, going forward)

 HOW TO INSTALL CATFISH FILE SEARCH APP (NON-SNAP PKG) IN UBUNTU 24.04

1. Open your Terminal. Copy and past the code in yellow below, then hit the enter key.
   sudo apt install python3 python3-distutils-extra gir1.2-gdkpixbuf-2.0
2. Close the Terminal.
3. Download this package to your Downloads Directory on your computer.
4. Extract the downloaded package to your Downloads Directory.
5. Right click on the extracted folder and choose “Open in Terminal.”
6. In your terminal, while still in the Catfish directory, do one of the following two commands to install Catfish:
1. To install locally (for a single user install), copy-paste and then hit enter:
   python3 setup.py install –user OR
2.  To install system-wide (all users) (a root install), copy-paste and then hit enter:
   sudo python3 setup.py install (This is the one I chose)

For a list of command line options run catfish  -help (I did not use any of the options.

I borrowed the install procedure above from a couple of web sites, one of which was too brief, the other way too convoluted for my particular situation and needs. I reordered and condensed all the technical gobbledygook. The Optional step below, which I declined to do for now, comes from one of those web sites.

Optional (I did not invoke any of the options in my install, but present them to you below (untested by me) in the event you are interested.)

Catfish includes optional support for Zeitgeist, which is used to provide
instant search results. You can learn more about Zeitgeist here:

Homepage: https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist-project
Arch Wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Zeitgeist

To enable Zeitgeist, just install the Python Zeitgeist GIR binding and ensure
the Zeitgeist datahub is running.

sudo apt install gir1.2-zeitgeist-2.0 zeitgeist