Tomboy is a desktop note-taking wiki for Linux. If you're unfamiliar with how a wiki works, I'll explain using a Tomboy example. Say you want to create a small note, such as "pay electric bill". With Tomboy, you can create links to other notes, such as "Bills" or "electric bill". You could create a note called "Bills" that listed all the bills you need to pay each month. One of the bills in this list could be "electric bill." You could then have a note named "electric bill" that contained the details of that bill, such as when it's due.

Sounds kind of complicated and cumbersome, but it's definitely not. Creating such a network of notes is extremely easy and mostly automatic with Tomboy. For example, I might have a master note (in Tomboy called "Start Here") where I list categories of notes, one of which is "Bills." All I have to do to make "Bills" a note itself is highlight it and click on the "Link" button in Tomboy. Then any time I type the word "Bills" in another note, it automatically creates a link to the "Bills" note. Likewise, if I create a to-do list for today and include "pay electric bill" in that list, "electric bill" will be automatically linked to the "electric bill" entry.

The best is surely to come with Tomboy, including integration into Rhythmbox and Evolution. The fact that it's this useful already is quite promising.

Tomboy requires Mono, which is based on the .NET framework (hey, someone should write something similar in Java!). I ended up downloading a pile of RPMs, but the install was pretty easy after that.