Long Live Open Source Software !!

For college student that facing thesis or final project, they can get resources from papers or journals written by experts around the world. But for them to get the paper they want is a hard thing sometimes. They must search in website that provide journal one by one. It can take much time, of course. But now there is an open source application that can help you not just search, download, and import journal from sites like ACM, IEEE, PubMed, and CiteSeer, but also manage them in your computer like iTunes did.

It’s named gPapers.  It’s an open source software that – they called – iTunes for PDF. Why the creator brave enough to call this open source software iTunes for PDF? Because this application really act like iTunes. See its features below if you don’t believe what i say.

• search / download / import PDFs (and misc. metadata) from ACM, IEEE, PubMed and CiteSeer
• automatic “bibtex and PDF finder” for other URLs
• manage relations between authors, papers, organizations, sources, publishers
• organize papers into collections
• search your local library, including full metadata and text extracted from PDFs
• make notes right into your PDF, indexed by page
• automated importation of referenced and “cited by” document links
• automated resolution of “these two authors are the same” issues (for authors, organizations, publishers, sources, etc)
• “smart” playlists store searches of your local library or any of the supported import sources
• rate papers and authors on quality

Now, are you believe in what i say? I hope you are. With those great features, i’m sure that gPapers can be a great application someday. But, it has weakness. Especially for linux newbies. Nobody has made it to software package yet. So, you must install it from source. I’ve tried to install in my laptop, but it still hasn’t succeed yet. I’ve got a problem when installing python-poppler library. If you want to install this open source application, you can follow the instruction in their wiki page. Or maybe you would rather install this open source application in Windows, you can follow the instruction here.

If anyone using ubuntu or linux mint has succeed in installing this application, i beg for your advice.. You can add comment below to give me some advices. Thanks before.