Zeitgeist For Linux

Zeitgeist (also known as the Zeitgeist Framework) is a command-line software implemented in Vala and designed to act as a service that logs the events and activities of a GNU/Linux user. It is used by default in the Ubuntu Linux operating system.

Zeitgeist provides desktop activity awareness and it can be used for logging various desktop events created by a user, such as opened files, visited websites, or chat conversations, and make this information available to other apps.

The project also offers support for tagging items, both manually by the user or automatically by the data provider, as well as support for bookmarking items. Zeitgeist can be used to establish a relationship between items based on usage patterns and similarity.

Installing the Zeitgeist framework on your GNU/Linux operating system should not be such a difficult task, even if the the program is only distributed as a source archive. Of course, Ubuntu users can install the package from the main software repositories of their distribution, if it isn’t already installed by default.

After saving the source archive on a location of your choice, such as your Home directory, you must unpack it using an archive manager utility, then open a terminal emulator application and navigate to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/zeitgeist-0.9.14).

Run the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compile the program, followed by the ‘sudo make install’ command to install it system wide and make it available to all users on your computer.

Taking a look under the hood of the Zeitgeist program, we can notice that it has been written entirely in the Vala programming language. We’ve successfully tested it with several 32-bit and 64-bit distributions of GNU/Linux.