Before I made the decision to ditch Windows Vista in favor of Ubuntu Linux, I asked myself what I would really be giving up. The only answer I could come up with was the marvelous Evernote client, which is not distributed in a Linux version. While the Web interface retains allmost all of the functionality of the client, it of course by definition lacks the convenience of a local copy of your Evernote database. With a little research, however, I am happy to announce that I am now running the latest Evernote 3.1.0.1225 in Ubuntu 9.04 using Wine. Wine is a Linux program that allows you to install and run many Windows programs in Linux. You can see that a couple of graphical components are a little wonky (the black boxes around the toolbar icons), but overall the functionality is intact. In fact, I took the above screen shot with Evernote. My database, over 1GB, synchronized without a hitch. And the automatic update feature even works properly as well. All in all, I'm extremely pleased.

Installing Wine in Ubuntu is very simple. Go to Applications > Add/Remove and type "wine" in the search box. Click the check box, click "Apply," and the program will install. To install Evernote, just download the installer file and double-click it. A launcher icon should appear on the desktop, and Evernote will also appear in Applications > Wine > Programs.

I found that at first, the text in the Evernote List View was not displaying. This was remedied with the simple registry fix below:

I may even try running some other Windows programs in Wine at some point. Maybe. But there are so many excellent native Linux apps, I may not need to.