Synchronize notes with Tomboy
I have been using Tomboy Notes on my Linux machines for more than a couple of years now. Needless to say, I often wished that notes on the other computer were also accessible to be on the one I am working on, at that moment. I was aware that it has a Synchronization option – using WebDAV. But, a few times I tried it, I was not successful at getting that to work.
Few days back, I had some success using non-Mozilla server with Weave. In the process, I got a WebDAV account at mydisk.se. Now that I had a WebDAV account, I thought I’d give Tomboy Synchronization another shot.
I built Tomboy from the latest svn source. This was easy, thanks to very clear instructions on the Tomboy Wiki.
% cd /my/source/directory
% svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/tomboy/trunk tomboy
% cd tomboy
% ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/apps/tomboy \
--disable-scrollkeeper
% make
% make install
On the first synchronization attempt, I got an error indicating that fuse/wdfs was not installed. To fulfill this dependency, I did the following:
% cd /my/source/directory % wget http://noedler.de/projekte/wdfs/wdfs-1.4.2.tar.gz % tar xzvf wdfs-1.4.2.tar.gz % cd wdfs-1.4.2 % ./configure % make % sudo make install
To get wdfs installed, I had to install the glib2.0 development modules:
% sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev
With this, I was all set for the first sync. However, due to a bug, that was not quite possible. But since I had the source, and bug report has the fix, I tried it out. I built Tomboy again, with the suggested fix. It worked! I have that build available in the downloads section for trying out.
A little work, and now my Linux machines have access to all my notes and stickies! I haven’t found a Mac app that has WebDAV synchronization of notes. If there is one, I’d love to try it out. The stickies utility in Mac OS X could really use some synchronization feature – not via .me.
I use Google Notebook a lot too. So some of the Ideas for new plugins sound interesting!

Thanks for reminding me about that patch…need to get that reviewed/committed! If you run into any issues with sync, please file bugs. I hope to fix sync bugs #535279 and #522424 next week during hack week (also, I plan to make Tomboy fairly functional on Windows and Mac OS X, but I can’t promise that sync will work).
Glad to hear about Windows and Mac OS X ports! I’ll love to be an early adopter and file some bugs – hopefully help get sync to work.