GTD, Tracks, Prism, Alltray

I read over Dave’s recent blogpost on installing Tracks and decided to give it a try. I’m not an apache ninja though so decided to do something which would not cause any difficulty to my working apache webserver I use for personal wiki’ing, project management, etc. This led me to finding bitnami which provides a complete stack that will run the application completely separately from all the other stuff and thus not harm what I have spent some time in setting and using. I actually tried getting ruby, rails, etc working in VMware and met with frustration and irritation so I knew there was a thing I wanted but could not quite get to. I also found a few hosting services for tracks which are actually decent. But I really wanted it on my work laptop; available all the time.

At this point, there is a cosmic divergence caused mostly by reading about this project called Prism which is a stripped down firefox browser and a small tray type application for gnome called alltray. So my vision was to get a stand alone and personal version of Tracks running on a laptop so I first installed Bitnami for Tracks which works really well. Then I got prism on Ubuntu 8.10 by doing apt-get install prism. Then I got alltray by doing apt-get install alltray.

So what does this have to do with running tracks? And bitnami? And checking out using GTD? Well, it does all come together. Because Prism can launch  my Tracks instance in this paired down window and create an object for the launch on my Ubuntu desktop. Then I can insert the command alltray before it and it positions the program on the gnome panel so it just stays there when I need it; out of the way; etc.

So, what do I think of Tracks and can I use it to make my day to day easier? I manage about 10 different projects and they all have a variety of “contexts” ranging from calls to research to meetings. Tracks presents it in this very slick interface and with Bitnami, its all almost “virtualized” and in its own instance with its own apache webserver and database instance. Very slick.

If you want a truly stand alone stack of applications, check out Bitnami. Works on the laptop a charm.  Thanks to Setuid for the pointer and the excellent open source software I found along the way.