Economy Size Geek

It looks like Tomboy (A really nice note/wiki Gnome widget) has released a great new feature. As of version 0.8 you can now sync your notes to a remote server. I was kind of doing that already using Subversion - but it never really worked the way I wanted it to.

I ran into a series of problems getting this thing to work. I’ll spare you some pain if you want to follow along.

Gutsy Gibbon Required - not

Ok first hurdle was the issue that the 0.8 package is only out for Gutsy - which hasn’t officially been released yet. I figured in this case it wouldn’t be a big deal. On the other hand, Tomboy is shipped as part of Gnome which gets an upgrade as part of Gutsy so I wasn’t sure if this was going to be an easy package to build.

Enter prevu

It turns out Ubuntu ships a tool that makes your life in backport land very easy. (Following the advice from here)

1. sudo apt-get install prevu
2. add deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy main restricted universe multiverse to your /etc/apt/sources.list
3. sudo prevu-init
4. sudo prevu tomboy

That took a while even on my beefy machine - mostly because Tomboy needs a lot of libraries to build. After that you get the new version of Tomboy in

/var/cache/prevu/fiesty-debs

Pretty cool - I killed Tomboy and then restart it and bam I have 0.8

Not So Fast

Tomboy offers two means of syncing - sshfs and wdfs. Both are fuse based remote file mounting systems. I tried to get sshfs to work - but for some reason it changed the permissions on the mounted directory in a way that didn’t allow my to sync. I would have preferred to go this route because it is way easier to sync via ssh (sshfs) than WebDav (wdfs).

After being thwarted by sshfs ( If someone figures it out let me know), I switched over to wdfs. Unlike most people I happen to have a personal webdrive up that uses WebDav already. Even given that head start it was still annoying.

What Package?

It turns out that wdfs doesn’t exist as a package in Ubuntu. Since I generally prefer packages to anything else I did the CheckInstall dance. (I am a huge fan of check install for this very situation - I can have package to use with other machines and uninstalling is easy). wdfs requires some packages to compile.

• wget http://noedler.de/projekte/wdfs/wdfs-1.4.2.tar.gz
• tar -xzf wdfs-1.4.2.tar.gz
• cd wdfs-1.4.2
• sudo apt-get install libfuse-dev libneon26 libneon26-dev
• ./configure (This makes sure you have everything you need to compile)
• sudo checkinstall

SSL Arggg!

I actually have a personally signed SSL cert on my webdrive. In theory, this makes things a little more secure. Unfortunately, wdfs doesn’t like that non-trusted cert. It turns out that the URL you put into Tomboy is passed without any special kind of escaping. This allowed my to add “-o accet_sslcert” to the url and get it past my cert.

I actually had to manually unmount the wdfs and then tell it to sync and things finally worked.

In the end, it was more work than I expected but at least now it works and since I have packages for both tomboy-0.8 and wdfs putting it on my other Ubuntu boxes should be seriously easy.