A question to the students among us:

Is there a student here with a notebook he uses in lectures?

I'm currently doing this and me and my friends who also use notebooks haven't yet perfected the way to take notes.

While some subjects are pretty easy where you just type what the guy says and writes down (which takes far more time than typing) some subjects are pretty difficult like mathematics and electronics with all those formulas and graphics.

What kinda systems do you use/can you recommend?

Another problem is that in some subjects we have some scripts in PDF-format but it's a little problematic to edit and change (taking notes, making corrections, etc.) them on the fly.

OpenOffice.org has a neat way to treat formulas and mayhaps that's the best we have so far but for graphics and such I don't know. And I also don't think that ASCII art is very efficient.

PS: I know about tablet PCs but they're just too friggin expensive at the moment. But how well do they work with Linux anyway?

Thanks for your input

i am using and i got my self some alias for the thing s in maths so i can type fast and when a got home i can change them.

I've used my notebook in courses I have taken...and I'm usually in command line, using VI.

Although I have no idea how I will use it when my math courses start.

my suggestion would be to use the laptop only when its convenient. math just would be easier with pencil and paper i think.

in college i pretty much always had a pc in front of me, since it was a tech school. and i for one can tell you its hard to pay attention to an english or math lecture when you are in front of a computer. too much stuff to do that is just more interesting.

maybe try looking into kformula

The best way to do any maths is to use a TEX system such as LaTeX, it lets you type in maths as plain text (takes a bit longer, but it renders quite nice)

So, if you want to write pi, you say $\pi$

or for theta squared on 10 is $\frac{\theta^2}{10}$

Once you get the hang of it, its pretty easy and you can use any text editor.

Then run latex to process it and it makes a DVI file. From that you can make PDF and PS files.