Simplifying Life With MediaWiki and Ubuntu
After several years of trying to find a good note-taking solution, I've finally settled on a local installation of MediaWiki on my Ubuntu laptop for managing information relevant to my academic and personal pursuits. Below, I outline my experiences with the software, and explain why the ease of deploying it and similar packages on Ubuntu is one of the platform's greatest, and perhaps most under-appreciated, strengths.
Since college, I've tried at least half-a-dozen different approaches to taking notes, and until now was less than satisfied with each of them. Handwritten notes are difficult to store and search through. OpenOffice is bulky for notetaking, while plain text files offer little opportunity for mark-up. The various note-taking applications that I tried, like Tomboy, were decent, but none offered exactly what I wanted.
In contrast, MediaWiki, the open-source wiki software used by Wikipedia and numerous other sites, has so far provided a compromise-free solution to notetaking. I can easily organize notes into individual "articles" for each book or topic that I deal with, and the built-in search allows me to find information quickly. Best of all, since MediaWiki is installed locally, I don't have to worry about having Internet access to take or read notes, and my wiki data gets automatically backed up with the rest of my system.
Why it matters
Of course, it's not exactly news that MediaWiki can be installed on a personal computer. That can be done for free on virtually any modern operating system.
What really impressed me, however, is the ease with which I got MediaWiki up and running. Installation was as simple as opening Synaptic, searching for MediaWiki and clicking "Apply." Dependencies were resolved automatically and seamlessly, which is considerably easier than installing the application on Windows.
I did need to refer to the Ubuntu documentation to discover that a quick edit to /etc/apache2/conf.d/mediawiki.conf was required before MediaWiki would run, but otherwise, the installation was smooth enough that a "normal person" would be able to handle it with no problems. (Note to MediaWiki package maintainers: why don't you make the application active by default so that editing mediawiki.conf would not be necessary?)
Promoting Ubuntu's package management
MediaWiki is not unique in its ease-of-deployment. Ubuntu developers have focused on making the installation and configuration of applications quick and easy; the dovecot-postfix package in Ubuntu 9.04 server edition is the most recent product of such work. Gone are the days when only experienced systems administrators had the skills to deploy Apache, mail servers, MySQL and other popular but complex software.
Ubuntu deserves more credit than it currently receives for this kind of work. Its extensive and well-maintained repositories simplify the deployment of complicated packages in a way uknown on proprietary platforms and rare even on most other Linux distributions. As such, features like these should be at the core of Canonical's efforts to promote Ubuntu both on servers and desktops.
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[…] post: Simplifying Life With MediaWiki and Ubuntu Tags: academic, ease, experiences, finally-settled, linux news, media, packages-on-ubuntu, […]
How are the articles stored locally? Is it installed in a database of some sort, or local files? A very important thing for me, with regards to notes, is that I want to be able to easily make backups, or move the files to another computer if needed.
@Andre: Like most wiki software, MediaWiki uses a database. That’s one reason that I selected TWiki, which can use flat files. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software for all of your options here.
Yep, with you here. Installing apache for an assignment was so much easier with the good package management.
Have you ever used Evernote? This is, in my opinion, a killer application. Unfortunately, it has no native client for Linux. MediaWiki is great, but it’s a bit too industrial for my needs, and I prefer my notes in the cloud so I am not tethered to my computer.
I agree with you on the package management system. It works great for free and open source packages, and it makes resolving dependencies mostly brainless. It isn’t all gravy though. One of its major problems is that it doesn’t scale to commercial applications, so users must know at LEAST two methods of installing apps: (1) the standard package manager, and (2) whatever method the commercial vendor deems fit, which could be anything from a .deb to a .tgz, or a shell script.
Another problem is that the organization of packages is chaotic. You almost have to know what you’re looking for before you search for it, and that defeats the purpose. I think tagging, a better quality management system, thorough descriptions, and screenshots could overcome this.
@josh: I agree. Whatever is prepackaged, and this means thousands of open-source software packages, is so much better than in windows, but we still need something like the windows installer for commercial apps. It’s too bad autopackage (or something like that) never got broad support. The most difficult thing I think is to manage dependencies universally. But at least a package installer will allow you for clean uninstall.
Something that really put me off openSuSE was RPM hell. Didn’t seem to matter what i wanted to install. There was always something missing.
That same thing put me off redhat, circa 1990, I switched to mandrake, which solved it very nicely with urpmi many years ago. It is not really an issue with rpm per se, but rather the lack of a package manager on top. Urpmi is to apt-get what rpm is to deb. Of course urpmi has had a graphical interface for ages. Now I am using Ubuntu. Also a pleasure. I thought SUSE had a package manager, though.
I do boggle slightly at this. Speaking as someone who’s written for Wikipedia since 2004 and installed MediaWiki several times for intranets and so forth, I must note that MediaWiki is the size of a goddamned tank. And fat. And slow. Fantastic for what it does, but as a glorified notebook … er, what?
@Josh – actually, a locked wiki in the cloud could be just the thing as a personal note-taking application. You can do this in MediaWiki by locking it such that only logged-in users can read other than the front page, making yourself the only user account *and* setting a .htaccess so outsiders can’t even get to the front page. Put it on https:// for added security. This works well for small collaborative groups too.
MediaWiki is an overkill if you want a Desktop note-taking/wiki.
I went with zim (http://zim-wiki.org/) instead. It’s built for a desktop environment and works well.
Take a look.
Thats actually not a bad idea, using a wiki for note taking. 🙂
[…] read an interesting blog today on using MediaWiki for notetaking. Like the author I use Ubuntu as my primary operating […]
Matt: MediaWiki is indeed a hefty application, and running it alongside Apache and MySQL can be too much for older machines to handle well. Zim looks nice, and I may well give it a try, although it seems to be a little rough around the edges.
I think it’s also worth mentioning that one of MediaWiki’s greatest strengths is that anyone who uses Wikipedia is already familiar with the way MediaWiki works. I liked not having to invest time to learn to use the application. On the other hand, I guess that’s like saying everyone should use Windows because that’s what they already know 🙂
Interesting, if I might say so myself. Its not the easiest way to take notes but it most certainly gets the job done elegantly. Back in my school days I tried it all and there are several piles of dead trees, floppys, zip disks, cds and flash drives to prove it. I always kick myself whenever I think how useful my notes I made years ago would help today, and the papers I spend many a sleepless night typing the night before they were due. Maybe this is in my future…
[…] Simplifying Life With MediaWiki and Ubuntu After several years of trying to find a good note-taking solution, I’ve finally settled on a local installation of MediaWiki on my Ubuntu laptop for managing information relevant to my academic and personal pursuits. Below, I outline my experiences with the software, and explain why the ease of deploying it and similar packages on Ubuntu is one of the platform’s greatest, and perhaps most under-appreciated, strengths. […]
If it required a “quick edit to /etc/apache2/conf.d/mediawiki.conf,” then it’s not ready for mainstream use. If Ubuntu is directed at Windows and Mac users, then this sort of stuff has to go. There are other Linux distros for techies, so why can’t be have at least one for non-techies? I think it’s time to declare Ubuntu what it’s fully capable of being — a command-line-free zone.
[…] How to organize yourself with MediaWiki and Ubuntu […]
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