Looking for openSUSE package for Zim the deskto wiki

[homoludens1000]

Does anyone know of an openSUSE package for Zim? (Zim - a desktop wiki)

Sounds like a nifty application and I'd like to try it, but I don't want to have to compile it myself ...

For whatever reason, Zim doesn't seem to be particular popular among the openSUSE community, while it is for example for Fedora. I'd be curious to know why. Is there another application people prefer?

[ab@novell.com]

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http://www.rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2htm...submit=Search+...

Often enough I find that packages for other RPM-based distros (RedHat,
Fedora, Mandrake/Mandriva, etc.) will work on SUSE so perhaps give one of
those a try, though looking at the two steps required to install Zim (not
including the download/extract of course) makes me think it is probably
worthwhile to try it yourself.... doesn't even look like it needs 'root'
access like it shouldn't.

Good luck.





homoludens1000 wrote:
> Does anyone know of an openSUSE package for Zim? ('Zim - a desktop wiki'
> (http://zim-wiki.org/))
>
> Sounds like a nifty application and I'd like to try it, but I don't
> want to have to compile it myself ...
>
> For whatever reason, Zim doesn't seem to be particular popular among
> the openSUSE community, while it is for example for Fedora. I'd be
> curious to know why. Is there another application people prefer?
>
>
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[Confuseling]

If you just want to make interlinked notes, zim is cool. If you want the power of an actual wiki, I'd recommend giving MoinMoin Desktop Edition a try. It's a full on wiki (a modified version is used, for example, for the Ubuntu wiki), written in python, and highly extensible with macros and such.

Its pages are stored as plain text (with markup, obviously) in the file system, rather than in a database - making it easy to manage them in some ways. This does cause questions about scalability, but nothing that would worry a desktop user.

It is a bit inconsistent in its handling of whitespace sometimes, and the documentation seems very patchy to me (which is odd, because it seems to be recommended in part on the strength of its documentation) - so if you're comfortable running servers, you may well be better off with mediawiki or similar.

But for me MoinMoin is perfect because it's so *immensely* easy to set up. You literally download and extract the package, change the paths and the name and such in a python script, run that script and then point your browser at localhost:8080, and voila, you have a wiki.

I've been using it quite a lot, so if you have any questions, start a thread and pm me to let me know.

[homoludens1000]

ab@novell.com,

thanks, I'll try one of the Fedora rpms. You're right, I should probably do that little bit of compiling myself, but as a bits&bytes amateur, I tend to shy away from such things ...

Confuseling,

just took at look the MoinMoin description, pretty impressive piece of software. If you don't mind me asking, what are you using it for on your desktop? It's pretty heavy artillery, isn't it?

[Confuseling]

Sure, ask away.

I'm using it principally for university notes, and the extra capabilities (tables of contents, buttons to show/hide sections (that's a separate macro, but easy enough to install), inline duplications of sections of other pages, etc) have proved useful. I certainly could have done quite a lot with zim - and if it were just a 'life wiki' of scribblings, notes and reminders, I'd have probably stayed there - but this gives me a bit more freedom, even if it is overspecified for my needs.

It weighs in at about 60 meg for the application directory, and the wiki itself is 5 meg so far.

It's pretty lightweight on system resources (doesn't show up in 'top' except when you're changing pages), and it's stable (have had one or two slightly bizarre occurrences, but nothing troubling and no data loss). Pages load in one or two seconds, so no problems there.

The only real problem in terms of unwieldyness is firefox. Its textbox is a pig (nothing personal ): I sometimes get 5 second delays for moving the cursor on my eee PC. If I'm writing something big, I just use the itsalltext extension to load gvim, which understands (and therefore colours) MoinMoin syntax and is plenty quick, or switch over to opera.

[homoludens1000]

ab@novell.com,

I tried some rpms I found on the net, but couldn't get them installed (usually some sort of missing dependencies error).

Originally Posted by ab@novell.com

(...) though looking at the two steps required to install Zim (not
including the download/extract of course) makes me think it is probably
worthwhile to try it yourself.... doesn't even look like it needs 'root'
access like it shouldn't.

Yeah, tried it. Not easy at all. I tried to follow the instructions from Zim - a desktop wiki. Installed missing modules like a good boy, until I was finally able to try "make test", but didn't work. Pooohhhhh ... Of course I should point out that most of the time, I had no clue whatsoever about what exactly I was doing there ...

Well, I've filed a request for including Zim into the openSUSE repositories. Probably faster than me trying to work out the intricacies of make / perl install ...

[TeaSwigger]

September 24 and I'm in the same situation as the OP. No Zim for OpenSuSE (it was requested already more than once), no Zim rpm will install (Mandrake & RedHats give dependency errors as the user above noted) and rather worse, I've just been through ye olde compilation tarnation - literally hours last night - trying to compile and install it myself to no avail. It really doesn't appear to be a particularly complex app but it appears that OpenSuSE's Perl modules just won't cut the mustard, even after trying to manually install any modules I could even get a hunch were needed from CPAN. Zim seems to have wanted Gtk2::Spell perl module but I tried and could not install it in OpenSuSE. Something about -pthread and it was finally one hoop too many. Somebody with more skill and experience can probably do it in a snap but it's out of my grasp now.

It's a really nice handy app, especially if one is a writer. Hierarchical note managers capable of being useful to an author are a niche in the app department that's been frustrating to me for years. Zim is one of the best I've seen (good balance between clean and featured) and moreover it uses easily accessible, well organized plain text files so one won't be in a tight spot if one can't or doesn't wish to use it anymore. Although its development is not substantial (1 author etc) it has been around a good length of time now and is apparently active/maintained. It would be a good app to have in the standard repos.

[homoludens1000]

TeaSwigger, thanks for the support!

I finally got Zim to compile, and have been playing around with it for a while. Really quite good, both as a simple notebook as well as an outliner. And as you mentioned, good outliners are still very rare under Linux (at least as far as I'm aware of).

There's apparently been some development at the bug report I filed regarding including Zim in the repos, so perhaps we're moving closer to out goal ...

[ab@novell.com]

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I was just able to download and compile it as well on SLED 11 x86_64. To
do so I had to get a few CPAN modules and I put them in a custom location
(./zim/perllib) and then set the PERL5LIB environment variable to that
directory. Once done the whole thing worked (./configure) and then ran
through the ./Build script very nicely. I can now load it without any
problems. I am posting the entire directory (including libraries) to
ftp://ftp.novell.com/outgoing/zim.tgz and while I cannot guarantee it will
be there long it is an option for those who do not want to navigate
through the four CPAN modules I had to grab. Feel free to build again
after extracting the tgz as this is the original Zim source plus the
original CPAN modules (in ./Zim-0.28/cpan).

ab@mybox:> md5sum ./zim.tgz
712e364a96d7c3a24eaccf0e3f0c56e6 ./zim.tgz

cd ./Zim-0.28
export PERL5LIB=`pwd`/perllib
../configure
../Build
../bin/zim

Good luck.





homoludens1000 wrote:
> TeaSwigger, thanks for the support!
>
> I finally got Zim to compile, and have been playing around with it for
> a while. Really quite good, both as a simple notebook as well as an
> outliner. And as you mentioned, good outliners are still very rare under
> Linux (at least as far as I'm aware of).
>
> There's apparently been some development at the bug report I filed
> regarding including Zim in the repos, so perhaps we're moving closer to
> out goal ...
>
>
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[TeaSwigger]

Originally Posted by homoludens1000

TeaSwigger, thanks for the support!

You're welcome, I was glad to see the interest. Very encouraging. How did you manage it if you can say?

My SuSE experience has been very positive so far but for the want of a few apps I'm struggling with.

Originally Posted by ab@novell.com

I was just able to download and compile it as well on SLED 11 x86_64. To
do so [...abbr.]

Thank you. Your thoughtful effort is appreciated.

Unfortunately this may be "over my head" a bit. I unpacked the archive and entered the listed commands in a terminal, but when I attempt to start the app it fails with the following feedback in the terminal:

Could not setup daemon: Address already in use at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0/Zim/GUI/Daemon.pm line 159.

...which alas is a mystery to me. I'm sure your package works but perhaps something is wrong on my system.

The 19th was "Talk like a Pirate Day" to most folks, but I'll make this day one too and say, "Arr!"