techblog 

I’ve been running Notes 7 on Debian using WINE for some time but I thought it was time to try out the native Notes 8. I use KDE so to get things running I had to install the following new packages (names may change and this may not be an exhaustive list)

apt-get install libgnome-desktop-2 libgnome-keyring0 libgnome-menu2 libgnome-window-settings1 libgnome2-0 libgnome2-common
libgnomecanvas2-0 libgnomecanvas2-common libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0
libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomeui-0 libgnomeui-common libgnomevfs2-0 libgnomevfs2-common libeel2-2 libeel2-data
gnome-terminal

In addition, I had to create a symlink /usr/lib/libeel-2.so.2 -> /usr/lib/libeel-2-2.16.so and had to set MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/iceape (it complains but seems to work). I’d also recommend running Notes from a terminal as the error messages quickly highlight any other missing components.
Unfortuately this new version feels like it is still in beta. Most problems seem to be glitches in the user interface but the biggest issue for me is printing which seems to be mostly broken. The only message I can see is

(:26287): Pango-WARNING **: failed to create cairo scaled font, expect ugly output. the offending font is 'DejaVu Sans 0'

Although Debian isn’t a supported platform many of the same problems seem to be present on SUSE.
On a more positive note, some of the new features are quite nice (compared to notes 7) and my biggest issue, search, now seems to work a lot better (I think this was a WINE specific issue). I think I’ll stick with version 8 for the moment in the hope that I may be able to find some workarounds for my problems.