The Linux Society

Post about Zim Wiki desktop for web site

Well i have been working for the past couple of days with Zim Desktop Wiki.  I have been needing to work on a number of documents for a number of projects, ranging from coursework, to Linux society promotional material.  It dawned on me that i maybe better suited to using a Wiki to work on a majority of the stuff.

So i thought, right open source geezer shouldn't be a problem.  I certainly had heard about Zim but i hadn't given it much thought.  I loaded up synaptic package manager for a quick search about and came across Zim.

I for the most parts i have used a Wiki like system for taking notes for sometime and anyone that knows me well will know of my love of tomboy notes, and how easy it is to take small snippets of information and make useful notes that can be indexed easily. 

So i installed Zim from the standard Ubuntu repository, and off i went.  I made a page of every document that i needed to make for uni and i was able to plod away and use that fantastic functionality that Wiki's generally give you.  Basically you set up a repository for the set of work that your working on, known as a notebook.  It automatically saves your files in the repository as a .txt files, which later on i found to be very useful indeed.

I thought at first that it was a little lacking in features, until i did a wee bit of research with Google and looked at the plugin section.  I had to install some other packages, but eventually i managed to get spell checking working (which if you guys haven't noticed by now i need due to my dyslexia playing havoc, and having every text input box checked for spelling is a massive benefit, just one of many reasons why i use Linux).  I also found a script that imports my tomboy notes into a notebook, this turned out to be of massive benefit.  The only draw back with tomboy notes is that they don't get indexed by default with Google Desktop, however once they where converted into a notebook and of course they where all converted into .txt files, which meant that Google Desktop was now able to index them.  So those thousands of notes now have a new lease of life and can be searched just like any other document type that Google Desktop index's.

I also set up the trayicon option, which at first doesn't sound to cool.  Then i realised you can set up an individual icon's for individual notebook.  Then i realised that i could load up separate instances of each notebook at gnome boot up time.  So now in my system tray i now have a specific desktop Wiki for all my coursework stuff, with it's own tux logo (it's only a tux because I'm a penguin fiend, but you can choose anything)  and then a specific Wiki for working on Linux Society stuff.

The code i used to load it up at start up was;

/usr/bin/zim --iconify /home/arron/Zim\ Internal\ Repo\'s/Viva\ Disc\ Repository/

Hope some of you guys find this of some use