I discovered Freemind few years ago, which is a very nice and useful tool. It is a mind maping application.
I use it for brainstormings (mostly with myself…), for taking notes on meetings, for creating the initial tasks tree of a project, for preparing a talk or even the structure of a document. It’s a great tool.
I’m not very fan of Java and probably this is the only Java application I use and I’m happy with 😉
But my problem with Freemind is that to find the last binary version for Linux is very painful… Even more if you try to find for your version of Ubuntu (in my case). There is a very old version for Ubuntu on the download section of the site, but too old. I always have to googling a lot before to find someone’s repository with almost last version on debian package format.
The official current version on Ubuntu is 0.7.1-6ubuntu4, but the current last version from the project itself is 0.9.0-RC6, which comes with a lot of interesting features. As you can see the gap is huge…
But Debian has now the last version packaged for sid 🙂
Before I discovered this, I found the PPA (Personal Package Archive) of Savvas Radevic with the version 0.9.0-rc4, almost the last one. I saw the sources and I realized that it was just a rebuild of the Debian version, so I looked for the last Debian version and I rebuild it.
So, if you like the last version of this nice application and you are using Debian, you could use the Sid package and if you are using Ubuntu Karmic, Ubuntu Jaunty (or Guadalinex v6) you could add my PPA and install from there.
If you don’t know, from Ubuntu Karmic (9.10) on you can add easily a PPA doing this:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:juanje/freemind |
Then you can install the Freemind’s packages normally. I think I’ll keep this PPA updated until there be a final stable version (0.9.0) in Ubuntu.
I hope you enjoy as much as me this software 😉
UPDATES:
- I made also the backport for Ubuntu Jaunty and is already at the PPA. I had to make also a backport for one dependency (simplyhtml), which is at the PPA as well.
- ScottK commented that the last version is already in Lucid. It seems to be uploaded to the repositories on 3th January.
