I’ve been using XMind a lot for mindmapping. It has fulfilled my needs somewhat well, at least I cannot come up with anything to nag about from the top of my head.

Except that there is only *.deb -package available for Linux. For the love of <pick your favorite deity here>. Not all of us are using Ubuntu. Don’t get me wrong, Ubuntu is ok to use. I’m not using it due to our servers are running CentOS. To get to know the issues you might run into when dealing with production, you should be using same (or at least one that is based on the same architecture) operating system on your workstation. So i do have Fedora, which is not CentOS, but close enough. I do admit being lazy here, there is CentOS -desktop available, but to get the tools needed to work with that is so much harder than with Fedora, that I did not even try this time. I might do that in the future, though.

Enough for OS rant.

1. Download Xmind for linux from vendor site
2. Uncompress the deb -package with ar
   1. [bluntinstrument@testing Downloads]$ ar -x xmind-x.y-xyz-linux_amd64.deb
3. There will be 2 tarballs extracted, data.tar.gz & control.tar.gz
4. Untar data.tar.gz:
   1. [bluntinstrument@testing Downloads]$ tar xf data.tar.gz
   2. You get a subfolder usr/
5. [bluntinstrument@testing Downloads]$ sudo cp -r usr/bin/ /opt/xmind/
6. [bluntinstrument@testing Downloads]$ sudo cp -r usr/lib/ /usr/
7. [bluntinstrument@testing Downloads]$ sudo cp -r usr/share/ /usr/
8. Untar control.tar.gz:
   1. [bluntinstrument@testing Downloads]$ tar xf control.tar.gz
   2. You get a script ‘postinst’
9. [bluntinstrument@testing Downloads]$ sudo sh postinst
10. Create symlink for XMind:
    1. sudo ln -s /opt/xmind/bin/XMind /usr/local/bin/XMind

And you’re good to go 😀

I used this guide as a reference: http://www.xmind.net/m/JKm6/