Goodbye Tomboy

Today is my last day with Tomboy, the note taking application in GNOME. I have been using Tomboy for the past few months and was impressed by it's features. However, there has been two issues which annoyed me. The first is Tomboy's performance - the time taken to launch the application is considerable. I have 1GB ram in my PC, but Tomboy hangs whenever I have some potential applications(Firefox, Thunderbird) running in my desktop. Secondly, Tomboy is based on Mono, a patent trapped implementation from Novell.

Thanks to Hubert Figuiere, who has ported Tomboy to C++ and released it as Gnote. Gnote is a lightweight application which is superior to Tomboy in terms of speed and has all the basic features of tomboy. The earlier version doesn't have applet support and hence we may have to start it from the Applications menu in GNOME.

The latest version(0.3.1) has fixed this and now you can launch the application right from the panel. It also supports printing via an add-on. Another interesting feature is that you can add bug reports from bugzilla using the bugzilla add-on. The latest news is that the developers are working on a feature which do automatic import from Tomboy.

Gnote is a budding application and have gained applause for it's speed and usability. I'm sure Gnote will surely reduce the dependency of GNOME on Mono.

Update:
An useful Tip : To import all your Tomboy notes to Gnote run the following command and re-login:

$ cp .tomboy/*.note .gnote/

Gnote may be slow when you first open your old notes, but it won't be an issue afterwards.

Stop Automount of Fixed hard drives

Fedora(9 and 10) shows all device icons for all the fixed drives on the GNOME desktop, which is annoying, especially if you have another distribution/operating system installed. The following links provide a useful tip to hide the unwanted device icons from your desktop.

Remove only HD-Partition-Icons from Gnome Desktop and keep the Hotplug-Icons

Hiding unwanted device icons on your Fedora desktop

An advertisement

A funny advertisement as seen on www.irctc.co.in.


Not sure what would be the exiting prize :-)