how to migrate my gnotes data to a macbook (OS X 10.7)

16pide · 11-20-2011, 05:03 AM

I just got a MacBook at work, and so I'm migrating from my thinkpad to it these days.
thinkpad was running ubuntu 11.04 with windows and redhat virtual machines in it.
MacBook runs OS X 10.7 with Windows and Linux VMs in it.

In Ubuntu I was using gnotes to store all my personal knowledge base, and now I want to have that running natively in OS X.
I need help on how to do that.
I have about 600 notes accumulated over time!

Should I find a way to convert to Apple Stickies?

Should I install tomboy on the Mac? and can I convert my gnotes into tomboy?

Will there be problems with accents? (some notes have French or Spanish accents).

Please help me decide the best strategy, my notes are important to my work!

16pide · 11-20-2011, 05:12 AM

I forgot to say, the ubuntu thinkpad is going away, I'll be running ubuntu and redhat VMs, but they won't be my main desktop.
So I do need to migrate the data to something OS X based. If I can keep the backward compatibility, that would be great though (I mean I'd like to keep the possibility to go back to a linux based laptop with the new notes I'll accumulate in the next few years.

So an important question is: is Apple's stickies a dead-end proprietary thing?

16pide · 11-20-2011, 08:48 AM

so I went ahead and installed tomboy 1.6 on my macbook.
guess what, there's a major bug on it (crashes on startup)
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=656680

any advice about my post would be welcome!

16pide · 11-20-2011, 09:54 AM

so I uninstalled mono 2.10 and installed 2.8
now tomboy works.

Any comments anyone?
I'd still like to hear from others feedback from my initial post above

vharishankar · 11-21-2011, 05:02 AM

I would say that unless there is a ready-made converter available, it would be very difficult to just port the data over. You might have to manually recreate the records (it would be a painful process).

Maybe you could ask the gnote developer or in their mailing lists whether it's possible to compile and use the app on Mac OS X.

16pide · 11-21-2011, 05:09 AM

thanks vharishankar.
fyi, tomboy 1.6 using mono 2.8 on OS X 10.7 is totally unusable, can't even resize the window without a crash, etc ...
I'm going for a fedora virtual machine with gnotes in it for now, and will monitor the web for a correction to https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=656680

vharishankar · 11-21-2011, 05:26 AM

If it is possible to export the whole thing to a text file, it might be more portable and give you more options to archive the past data. I've never used gnote or tomboy before, so I am not sure if that is possible. But if you are reliant on the wiki-style links and other formatting then it might not be the ideal solution.

16pide · 11-25-2011, 08:49 AM

I tried what vharishankar suggests, and wrote a script to convert all my notes to .txt files.
Now i can use

Code:

grep -i something -l *.txt

to search through them, etc ...
First, I installed HTML-XML-utils to get the hxextract command.
Here is my script:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
for file in *.note; do
{
newfile=`hxextract title $file| sed -e :a -e 's/<[^>]*>//g;'|sed -e "s/\//--/g";echo ".txt"`
hxextract note-content $file| sed -e :a -e 's/<[^>]*>//g;' > "$newfile"
}
done

I'm quite sure it's not general purpose, but it worked for me.

vharishankar · 11-25-2011, 11:19 AM

Thanks for sharing that script. I'm sure somebody will find it useful.