Synchronising Tomboy notes to a WebDAV account using Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope i386 or amd64

The standard Tomboy that comes with Jaunty will not sync to WebDAV. This page details a fix.

Installing and compiling Tomboy and supporting packages

Copy and paste into a terminal:

cd ~
mkdir tmp-tomboy-webdav
cd tmp-tomboy-webdav
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends pkg-config tomboy wget libgtk2.0-dev libneon27-dev libfuse-dev
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
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd ..

For AMD64, copy and paste:

wget https://edge.launchpad.net/~brywilharris/+archive/ppa/+build/949140/+files/tomboy_0.14.0-0ubuntu1-1bh_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i tomboy_0.14.0-0ubuntu1-1bh_amd64.deb
cd ..
rm -rf tmp-tomboy-webdav

For i386, copy and paste::

wget https://edge.launchpad.net/~brywilharris/+archive/ppa/+build/949141/+files/tomboy_0.14.0-0ubuntu1-1bh_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i tomboy_0.14.0-0ubuntu1-1bh_i386.deb
cd ..
rm -rf tmp-tomboy-webdav

Configuring Tomboy

Run Tomboy and, in the Search All Notes window, select Edit > Preferences from the menu. Choose the Synchronisation tab, then the WebDAV service from the dropbox, and key in the necessary details for your WebDAV account. You are advised to press the Advanced button and check those settings before you Save and Close the Preferences dialogue.

Syncing

To synchronise, got to the Search All Notes window and select Tools > Synchronise from the menu.

Why all this downloading and compiling is needed

Tomboy uses WDFS for WebDAV syncing, not FuseDAV. There is no package in Jaunty for WDFS so it must be compiled from source.

Tomboy is installed twice here: once from the standard repository to make sure you get the menu shortcuts and icons, and again as a patched version to work with kernels that have FUSE compiled in, as the Tomboy shipped with Jaunty tries to load a FUSE kernel module when syncing. The other packages are needed to compile WDFS and download the sources.

Many thanks to Bryan at Launchpad who made the patched Tomboy packages.