I noticed a classmate using some sort of note-taking software in class the other nite. After asking him what it was, I found out it was part of a student Microsoft Office package. Called ‘One-note’ or something like that. It seemed pretty cool – and I figured I could find something at least as good (if not a bit snazzier) for linux.

Well, I was right. Kind of. I did a post on the Ubuntu Forums and got quite a few replies. Here’s the best of what I found.

Basket Note Pads

The best one I tried out was called Basket Note Pads. It is availiable in the regular ubuntu repos (though the version is slightly older that what is availible on the website). I tried to install the latest from the website, but didn’t have much luck, so I thought I’d just try the one in the repos to see if I liked the program. To install:

sudo apt-get install basket

Pretty much love this program. It’s kind of a twist on Tomboy notes (which comes with Ubuntu), but I really enjoy it. I am going to use it, though maybe not (at first, at least) to take notes in class. But I will probably play with it for research papers and such – I think it’ll be great for that!

KeepNote

This also seems like a pretty promising program. It has some awesome export capabilities (which I haven’t tried yet…). It’s not in the repos, but you can download a .deb isntallation package from the website. It installed great in Ubuntu. This, to me, seems geared a little more towards formal research.  I’m going to hand onto this and maybe work through some of the documentation on the website to figure out if it might handle my note-taking ‘process’ (Basket provided several example pages which made starting out really, really easy – not so this program)

Gasket

Gasket is a simple program written in python. I had to download a .tar.gz from here, extract it, and then follow the installation instructions (using the terminal) to install it. The installer had to grab some python program to do the installation, but it did everything (after asking me first, of course!) and was really painless. It ended up being a slightly simpler version of Tomboy – but it did have some rather snazzy little icons you could insert really easily to flag/tag stuff in your notes. Not too bad in my mind.

Overall, in my mind, Basket is probably the closest to what I need – though if I figure out KeepNote, it might actually work better. But for right now I’m going to be sticking withthe  OpenOffice.org word processor for my notes for the time being. It can format and bullet and list as I prefer. Though I am definitely going to play with Basket some when I do research for some papers and stuff this semester.

I like to keep backup folders of my essential files (mainly documents, music, and pictures) on an external drive. But I like it to be browsable – most backup software creates compressed files which can’t be browsed and partially copied back from. Anyways, I started a thread here to see what others knew about.

I found out about sbackup and keep – both programs you can snag via synaptic or the every snazzy command line:

sudo apt-get install keep

or

sudo apt-get install sbackup

In my mind, keep seems a little more promising – if you read the thread from the link above, obviously one fella really likes it. I was slightly irritated with sbackup after trying to use it once.

I previously knew about rsync, but I also knew that it was a command-line program – meaning you pop up a terminal session and do all the work there. I really wanted an interface I could work through. Well, that’s where grsync comes in. It is quite simple – but it does the job rather well. I really liked the fact that you could set up “profiles” for synchronization of folders which you synched up often.

This should install it:

sudo apt-get install grsync

(note: I had already install rsync when I ran that command to get grsync, but I assume that the package management system would take care of getting that dependency installed for you)

Read about GThumb in this thread. Run this to install it:

“sudo apt-get install gthumb”

Definitely very lightweight. It fired up in no time, and it uses Nautilaus’ thumbnails, so it runs pretty darn fast as well. I am probably going to play with this for a bit and see how it works out.

I’ve been looking for a new program to resize photos for my blog. I’m using Gimp now, but it’s a slow loader on my older laptop, and all I really need is a program to resize an image. I read about Mirage here, and it seems to work pretty well.

Run this to install it:

“sudo apt-get install mirage”

I’m going to keep looking around – I’ll keep posting any that I come across.

If you haven’t already checked it out, Full Circle Magazine is a webzine (think that’s the right term – online magazine) dedicated to Ubuntu. It’s pretty cool. I usually find something in every issue that I want to try out (not that I always get around to it…).

They’ve got all the back issues on their website as well. Here’s the address:

http://fullcirclemagazine.org/