Under Ubuntu I tired of Nautilus, which is too slow, when I manage a collection of files larger than 100 items. It is also a pure file manager and doesn't allow me to organize my files in a "semantic" way.

I tried Dolphin, it is awesome. I started Nepomuk under Gnome with "nepomukserver" command. First there were some errors and it crashed several times. Then I selected only the folders I need it to index through its GUI. Now I'm almost happy, because all my tags, including ID3 tags are visible in Dolphin's side panel and the collection of files is opened almost immediately.

The only problem I have is that documents from Nepomuk watched folders are not indexed by full text. I have only meta-attributes and file names in my search results, but content of the files (particularly, PDFs) is not searchable. For instance I tried Meta Tracker - it does index full text.

I'm sure Strigi must also search over all files, here is an excerpt from strigi-utils package description:

This package is part of Strigi Desktop Search, it contains utilities powered
by Strigi:
...
deepgrep, an enhanced version of grep. It searches in binary files like
OpenOffice files, mp3s, Microsoft office files, pdfs and also in files
embedded in other files like .deb, .rpm, .tar.gz, email attachments, pdf
and other files.
...

So obviously it's me who's missed something. I suppose I have to do something to enable full-text search in Nepomuk/Strigi? Has anybody run Nepomuk manually successfully with all its capabilities? I understand that I'm trying to run KDE-targeted soft in Gnome, but there should be a way to do this.

It is similar for me using Kubuntu Maverick with KDE 4.6.1. Full-text search within pdf or odt etc never worked for me.
I would also welcome ideas on how to let it rock.

Try Recoll instead http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/

Bit more work to set up and works fine on pdf's but does not index meta data for that you'd still need Nepomuk. See http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/fe ... l#doctypes to see what ancillary programs need to be installed to index various file types (if not automatically installed by the package manager).

Yes you're surely right, I always can use any possible alternatives for that. But: I don't want to mess my system up with software I should not need, because the functionality should work with KDE natively.
There must be a way to let it run with strigi/nepomuk?

I use recoll for all type of desktop search: files, files content, document content ... it is an amazing tool. I have not found any use for nepomuk and i was missing beagle so far, and with recoll i found what was missing in KDE