Learn Flashcards Efficiently - Tips and How to get OpenCards Running in Linux - Slow Opening of Files in Openoffice and LibreOffice

OpenCards is a great, optimized memorizing software that ensures you need as little time as possible to learn your flashcards.
What you get

• As it's based on Openoffice, you can make full featured flash cards including diagrams, mind maps and everything else supported in Impress.
• Focus on learning. As it logs your progress and automatically schedules the next time to question you, you can learn without organizing what to learn when.
• The repetition schedule is based on modern psychological research. The Leitner system is "a widely used method to efficiently use flashcards that was proposed by the German science journalist Sebastian Leitner in the 1970s. It is a simple implementation of the principle of spaced repetition, where cards are reviewed at increasing interval." (Wikipedia)

What you need

• Openoffice or Libreoffice* from your distributions repository
• Java Runtime Environment, the Sun one**.
• Set Openoffice to use the Sun JRE.
• Opencards (v. direct download v. 1.5)
• Install Opencards, basically as any other OO extension (howto).

* I'm not sure if it works with LibreOffice, can someone with a newer distribution release test that?
** Installation may work with others, eventually, and using it, too, but you will have frequent crashes. So that is something for JRE developers willing to debug issues.

Tips

• Disable Linguistics in Openoffice to speed up loading of files.
• Don't let files grow too large. OO.o slows down considerably with larger files.
• Use the long term manager to learn a big load of flash cards over an extended amount of time. This makes it much less stressful. When the exam comes, you'll already know everything!
• In the long term manager you can add several files in categories.
• Backup your cards constantly. They're worth a lot to you. E.g. put them into a Dropbox folder.
• Tell other people about it and share your cards, check for other people's cards.
• Vote for the bug (formerly here) to speed up the opening of large files frequently needed in Opencards.

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