Arch Linux

demian

Member

From: Frankfurt, Germany

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 709

linux & learning software. your tips/tricks/experiences w/ studying.

Hey everyone,

I'm a college/university student and find myself using my laptop a lot for studying lately. I use it mainly as a substitute for pen and paper so I'm wondering how I could make even better use of the PC/laptop while learning.

Enter thread. I'm really curious as to how you use/used linux while learning/studying.
Did you
* find learning software that generally helped you a lot with your learning experience?
* develop a particular organizational system for your documents?

Or maybe you found a very satisfying way to document lectures with LaTeX/OpenOffice and/or keep backups of all your documents?

One thing I found very useful over the last weeks is Dropbox. I always have 3 automatically synchronized copies of my documents (one on the homeserver/PC, one on my laptop and one on the Dropbox servers).

Personally, I'm studying law and when I was planning on using MS Windows I found that there exists a lot of probably very useful software. Among them a commercial application that would create a virtual filing system for documents that you could even automate to a certain extent (it could file with dates, field of law, name of lecture/professor et al). Another application would let you create virtual file/index cards, keep track of whether of not you learned them, when you learned them, if you got the answer right and it would also tell you when best to learn older cards again.
I never got to really test those apps because I didn't have a laptop back then.
Later I forgot about them and these days I just want to use (arch) linux as I'm so comfortable with it.
That's it from me for now. I'll try to find out if there are linux equivalents of the depicted software. If you already know some don't hesitate to tell me

TL;DR: What's your experience with using a laptop/PC to help with studying or working? Did you find/write any software you'd think others might find useful for learning?

Regards,
demian

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no place like /home
github

AlexS

Member

From: Munich, Germany

Registered: 2009-05-16

Posts: 114

Re: linux & learning software. your tips/tricks/experiences w/ studying.

I use Tiddly Wiki to organize reference notes, jabRef to store article references, and my smartphone as a to do list support in synch with my computer. If you really need more, you might consider Evernote to file and classify heterogenous materials (photos/recordings/OCR text/normal text). I have never found a practical opensource alternative to evernote/onenote (same for dropbox).

If you want to write documents the lazy way, txt2tags is an option. Finally, if you're into emacs, Org-mode is THE obvious tool.

Cyrusm

Member

From: Bozeman, MT

Registered: 2007-11-15

Posts: 1,053

Re: linux & learning software. your tips/tricks/experiences w/ studying.

I don't use my pc for studying at all. In lectures I still rock the good ol' paper and pencil (I have yet to find a program that works as well for my personal note taking style).  For school work, and just work in general, I mostly use Dropbox for backups and remote file access, LaTeX for all of my reports and papers, apvlv for viewing pdf's and Gnu Octave + Gnuplot for most numerical computation and graphing purposes. Any other software I use specifically for computer engineering course work, and thus probably doesn't really belong in this thread.

I like the above software primarily because it is lightweight, completely keyboard driven, and because I just love using them over other alternatives.  I especially love the quality and look of documents generated using LaTeX.  Your papers might be complete crap for content, but at least they will LOOK nice

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Hofstadter's Law:
           It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

msl

Member

Registered: 2010-12-13

Posts: 22

Re: linux & learning software. your tips/tricks/experiences w/ studying.

I just found this recently and want to share it with you:
http://remus-software.org/

Seems very promising!

vanvalium

Member

From: Austria

Registered: 2010-10-09

Posts: 86

Re: linux & learning software. your tips/tricks/experiences w/ studying.

Finally, if you're into emacs, Org-mode is THE obvious tool.

orgmode is really awesome, you can use it for almost anything (and it's perfectly usable without any configuration)
there's also a vim version in progress which is supposed to be quite nice

vae77

Member

Registered: 2010-07-02

Posts: 75

Website

Re: linux & learning software. your tips/tricks/experiences w/ studying.

The method that really works for me is continuously learning, step by necessities.

Exemple: VIM
I started using vim with just knowing the very basic: Insert for switching modes and :wq save and exit and hjkl keys..
Once I was familiarized with the system, gradually I begin learning more and more, sometime I was going to do one task and I just think, Is there a better way to do this? And then research.

Today I'm able to get really fast stuff I could take a lot longer and probably I was not going to memorize in the beginning.

I do this for almost everything and it works, for programming, I usually go a bit deeper than with tools.

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http://about.me/fernandogrd

gombost

Member

Registered: 2011-05-11

Posts: 13

Re: linux & learning software. your tips/tricks/experiences w/ studying.

I love learning languages and I have the following workflow:

I use an application called Anki. It is a spaced repetition software (SRS) that helps you remembering things. It has a nice community and the software itself is very effective. I think every student who has to remember for a long time what he learned (language learners, law or medical students for example) would find it extremely useful.

When I'm travelling by public transport I study my new material, make notes about it on my Android phone etc. I can keep my phone in sync with my desktop computer easily with Dropbox. I put the new material into Anki when I get home. I record the grammar points I studied in a LibreOffice spreadsheet and I also have a list of the grammar points I want to learn next. I always do my Anki repetition before putting in new grammar or vocab.

With this workflow for example I have learned more than 3000 Japanese characters in a little less than 5 months and I have no problem remembering them. I was also able to learn and remember thousands of words in a relatively short time and study grammar much much more effectively than I would have done in a normal language course.

iFSS

Member

Registered: 2011-01-29

Posts: 33

Re: linux & learning software. your tips/tricks/experiences w/ studying.

+1 for Anki, it has downloadable decks for a huge range of subjects.

Basket Note Pads is pretty good as a note taking/organising app.