I still feel a little blind working with Linux...like I'm constantly bumping into things, then feeling them to figure out what they are.  When I want to find them again, I sort of have to stumble around again and the process repeats.  It's getting better, but it's just a steep learning curve for a Windows-only boy like me...

My Own Confluence
I've managed now to get a Confluence personal installation running nicely (with hands-on help from Atlassian) inside Ubuntu 6.10. 

Confluence seems to be the perfect solution to a problem I've had in managing certain kinds of customer and company information...I can create a 'home' page for each customer, new pages for each of their computers/systems, pages for repair notes and site visits, etc.  So far, it's just about perfect...for one thing, all the information is available anywhere I can get an Internet browser fired up, and having complete searchability is a huge bonus.

One other nice benefit is I can configure each customers' entry in Business Contact Manager so their BCM 'home page' points to their 'Home Page' in the Confluence installation.  This links the two systems pretty cleanly, as I can quickly pull up their extended information in Confluence by clicking the link inside Outlook. 

Of course, Confluence is excellent for managing all kinds of information, and I'm using it daily to store all kinds of phone, meeting, and other data.  If I run into problems with this combination, I'll post it here; but for now, Confluence is perfectly filling a huge information management void for me. 

Version Control via SVN, too!
I've also now got SVN installed, configured, and working very well on that Ubuntu box.  Previously, I had 'local' SVN repositories on 3 different machines at 2 locations.  Having a 'real' SVN server means I can consolidate all those projects (sheesh, there are more than I thought!) in one place.  While I'm the only developer that uses them, it's nice to just have one system to worry about backing up. 

It's worth pointing out that while I found a lot of articles explaining how to install/configure SVN server on Linux/Ubuntu, this one was perfect in it's detail (for me, at least).  After that, this article was just as good at helping me move the subversion repositories from the Windows local repositories to the Linux server.