For students like me, it may be a busy time for studying at the end of January. I was interesting in trying out some flash-cards for memorizing question and answer format material, but without using lots of small paper cards. It turns out there’s a great flash-card application in the Ubuntu repositories.

Mnemosyne does a lot more than traditional paper cards can. It decides which questions to show when using a zero to five grading system. How well you grade your answer determines if the question will be asked relentlessly or rarely.


Start by adding items, click the add button in the tool bar to open the Add Items dialog. Here you type the question and answer. Unicode is supported, so you can use characters from other languages without trouble. Select an initial grade to add the card.

Once there are flash-cards in the database, the main window will display an item to test you on. Once make your guess, click Show Answer, and then select a grade to advance to the next one.

Saving is done automatically to the default database when Mnemosyne is closed. Databases can be saved as Mnemosyne’s .mem files, XML, and text. Here’s a sample database of 20 Linux acronyms that you can open with Mnemosyne.

Mnemosyne is available in Ubuntu 7.10 in the package mnemosyne. You can also click Install Mnemosyne to install it in Ubuntu 7.10 with apt-url. Source code for some newer versions are available on Mnemosyne’s website.

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