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Evolution 0.99, Release Candidate Out
savaget writes "Evolution 0.99 (Release Candidate 1) is out!
"Yes, you read that right: the release candidate for Evolution 1.0 hit the wires this evening. After two years of hard work and more than 700 thousand lines of code written, the sleepless hackers at Ximian are finally getting to the long-awaited 1.0 release of Evolution, the GNOME groupware suite."" One of the most important projects in the open source world today. Best of luck to the monkey boys @ Ximian squashing any last minute arrivals.
Does 700,000 lines of code seem a little bloated to anyone else? I guess it is suppose to do everything (kitchen sink included)..........
Full annoucement here
http://www.ximian.com/products/ximian_evolution/
http://www.ximian.com/products/ximian_evolution/
700,000 lines is actually pretty small compared to most commercial products these days. And depending on the language it's written in that can vary. Of course it's often been said that most Open Source projects don't have a lot of quality control in the programming department. A lot of strict guidelines are enforced on both coding style and coding documentation where I work.
:)...
It is nice to see that the Open Source community can produce something that's every bit as good as Outlook in functionality (I didn't say stability
I like Evolution a lot, and its become my e-mail client of choice as of late (well, when my machine's memory isn't going up in smoke that is) but I was wondering if anyone has done any evalutions of Evolution on a large scale basis.
I.e. has anyone in a company been testing to see how well it plays with existing back end infrastructure (Exchange, etc)? How well does it play with others? Which features does it not play with well? Where does it need more work? Ect.
Any plans to port to Mac OS X?
Would instantly have 10 times the potential market...
Reality has a liberal bias
I did a Red Carpet update a few days ago and my Evolution now says it's ver .99 release candidate 1. Just to get rid of the "Thank you for using..." nag screen it's worth the upgrade.
Seriously though, I've been using Evo since the .5 days and have enjoyed watching the advances in stability and feature set. Sure, it's no pine, but it's stable and offers all the functionality I need to convince my wife to try linux instead of winblows (she swears by Eudora and won't use anything else, no matter how much she complains when her Win2k box crashes several times/week).
this is getting old and so are you
blog
actually,
sylpheed/kmail are probably much easier to use for the ordinary user.
evo has features that 99.9% of users don't use.
I just can't get over the interface. Yes, yes, I know, it's "intuitive" (read: familiar to people who've used Outlook), it's just doesn't match the way I work. As a long-time hater of the KDE 1.x line (ugly, windows-based crap) I never thought there would come the day that I would drop Gnome and/or E in favor of KDE, but that day has come (and gone, I switched over 6 months ago). KMail is the only mail client I've used in linux that approaches Eudora in ease of use *and* features. Ingo, Marc, and Michael have crafted a nice, stable, mail client. Evolution would do well to get to the same level.
That said, GO GNOME! If they can win me back on technical merits, rock on. I've tried evolution a few times in the past, and (like moz) people keep saying "try the latest nightlies! they are *so* much better!". Well, when they do reach 1.0, I'll try them again. Never let it be said I'm not open minded *grin*.
So, as noted:
- In this build only, Palm-OS sychronization is temporarily disabled. It will return in the next release.
- Under certain rare circumstances, IMAP connections over SSL can hang Evolution. We expect to have this issue resolved shortly.
Just in case these things are important to you.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I wonder when / if they will be intrested in working with other projects on an open XML-RPC / SOAP standard for the data access. This way, they could pull there data from a phpGroupWare server, or pull data from any number of projects that support the standards.
:)
There idea would a datastore is IMAP, which makes no sense to me. But, thats how they want to add groupware functionality. I haven't been following the project very close, a few other developers in phpGroupWare have been hounding them.
At any rate, if you would like to see there client work with other open source groupware applications via XML-RPC / SOAP. Start bugging them.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
Hmm, I've found Evolution to be far more stable and usable than KMail. In particular, Evolution's IMAP support is superb. KMail, despite claims to the contrary, does not seem to be happy with large IMAP folders at all, and I have watched it crash and burn once or twice, but it was really the extremely slow startup time while rechecking the entirety of my large IMAP folders. It's just too damned slow on startup. I have used it just fine with POP in the past though, I just think it has a ways to go on the back end support before it is as good as Evolution.
I used Evolution for my mail on the systems where I run Redhat 7.0 and 7.1. The problem is that on my personal machines, I run Slackware 8.0. I love Slackware and there is no way that I'll switch just for a mail client. Has anyone had much success getting around the Ximian library dependency issues? Slackware can install RPM's in its own package format and there are extension's for .TGZ's package manager to include dependencies.
Anyway, My point is that Evolution like most of Ximian's stuff needs too many weird library dependencies (which is why I try not to use Ximian GNOME anywhere). I have tried to compile it using all of the requested RPM's and I have tried installing it and all of the requested libraries from source, but with no avail. Will there ever be a way to install it cross-distro like Mozilla or StarOffice's binary install? I think that this ability would help Evolution gain more ground in the Unix world.
-dr. layyze f. tooth PhD
Let's not forget the Monkey Girls as well!!
****
"I'd never want to join a club that would have me as a member" - G. Marx
Linux is and has always been a server OS and I find it rather amusing that a simple pretty GUI email application is being crowned as "One of the most important projects in the open source world today"
It is amusing. Many die-hard Linux advocates claim that the fact that MS still holds the desktop for the foreseeable future is irrelevant. Yet the way projects like this are being touted whenever there is some progress made suggests inconsistency. As with most chauvinisms, particular points are relevant only to the extent that one's own biases are being advanced.
I assume Taco means bugs. Hasn't he ever been to a zoo? monkeys don't squash bugs... they pick them off each other and eat them. I bet that'd be a weird room to be in...
I know I'll get flogged for this. But, is there any chance of running this in win32?
Last minute update:
Evolution (any release) not permitted on computers owned or operated by schools or students in the State of Kansas.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Kmail put all mails into different files corresponding to folder in ~/Mail in mbox format. So, i "cat" every files into one big file and i tell evolution it's my mailbox.
Why did you do this? Evolution also maintains separate mbox files for each folder. Look in ~/evolution/local/
All you need to do is create directories off ~/evolution/local/[folder] for each mail folder and move the mbox file in there, renaming the file to "mbox" on the way.
In brief, for each mail folder, you want ~/evolution/local/[folder]/mbox
Evolution (IIRC) will create the various control files as required.
Not quite, I personally still prefer Emacs/Gnus to Evolution. Gnus flat slices and dices mail (yes Evolution's got some good stuff too), but more importantly I like editting text in Emacs. After all, there's nothing quite as cool as firing up artist mode for some cool ASCII art in your email (or a quick text based diagram), or being able to actually use your coding Emacs tricks when you send code samples in an email.
And a million other reasons. Besides, once you start down the Emacs trail you will soon find that Emacs does everything. I use it to keep track of appointments and contacts too.
So Evolution isn't quite the Emacs of email clients. Emacs is still the Emacs of email clients. And it even has an excellent vi emulation mode!
What I'm confused about is to what degree it does or doesn't work with Exchange. It's such an obvious Outlook clone and the web site brags about how it "works alongside messaging systems such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes." so I was hoping my wife could use it to replace the web interface to Exchange on her Solaris workstation. (It's not so bad when you have IE available, but it's clunky with Konqueror and awful in Communicator or Mozilla.)
It seems, though, that Evolution supports vCard and the calendar standard (forget its name) but the Exchange mail support is limited to IMAP and POP. Is that right or am I missing something?
By the way, for the people squabbling about Evolution vs KMail -- they're different things. I prefer the lighter interface without features I don't need but it's an apple and orange comparison.
Right.
Give easy to use apps in an already set-up environment, and people will be productive. I've been using Pronto mail, but the development on it has been slow lately and there are some very annoying bugs, so I may give evolution a try.
Following these rules does not mean using mutt on the console - you can enjoy a GUI experience without creating bloatware. KMail is a great example of this - it reads and sends mail with a simple interface that does not attempt to solve an integrated problem.
Unfortunately so many linux projects have become so obsessed with attracting Windows users (why? Do we really expect these people to switch over? Get real!) that linux environments are becoming as fractured as Windows.
They require literate users and can be used over a ssh session. Obviously the inferior solution is better since it's more like Microsoft's solution
http://www.muhri.net/pronto
I recommend using MySQL as a backend for speed. The CSV stuff is slow when you have a lot of messages.
Is this really groupware, or just a nice e-mail client?
Groupware should help people collaborate. For example, Lotus Notes has e-mail, calendar, sure, but it is primarily a general purpose platform for building applications that require managing documents as they move from person to person. E-mail is just another application built on the platform.
Calling exchange groupware is kind of an exaggeration, and the attempts to create exchange-like open source "groupware" I've seen have been pale imitations of a pale imitation.
Honestly, though, if this had just had a decent free shared group calendar it would be a big step forward.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Ok, BIG difference. With Pop3 you simply download the email into a local folder. With IMAP the emails stay on the server and you are browsing folders remotly. A goot IMAP client with make local copies of the mail also, so that you don't have to redownload everytime you want to look at a piece of mail. Think Webmail, without the web :)
Seriously. How long is a "line of code"?
A line of code is the text between 2 newline's
If kmail does the job for you, beautiful! Use kmail.
Competing packages, like kmail and evolution (to the extent that they 'compete') are good for the linux community. Different environments ensure that more users find the functionality they're looking for.
I always find it troubling the seemingly militant conflicts between hard core KDE users and the pro-Gnome users. Both seem to think there's only one real solution to the desktop "problem," but a loss of either would be a significant blow to the Linux community.
As for the people who say that linux is a "server" OS, and that we should abandon the desktop battle, consider what losing the (admittedly small) group of people who use linux for a primary user OS means... a larger user base and development of desktop apps inherently means more attention to your OS, and more resources into making the server aspect better. If Linux goes server-only, there will be considerably fewer resources sunk into developing the OS as a whole.
Here's a good description of IMAP vs. POP3:
IMAP vs. POP (www.imap.org)
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
Several, just about everyone in my family has. Many of my non-tech friends have as well. Out of the dozen or so that I have known to do their own installs, one has totally fubared their system.
Give easy to use apps in an already set-up environment, and people will be productive.
True, but, people like to install new things. Installing a new program in Windows is easier for a non-tech than it is in Linux (or *any* flavor of unix).
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I looked through the change log, and found no mention of the NFS locking bug that you get when your home directory is an NFS mount (which is of course, a common setup on a company network).
Does anyone know if this is fixed? It's such a basic problem that I can't believe it's been in there since version 0.8 or something. It wouldn't be so bad if evolution allowed you to specify where to put your mail store, but no, it doesn't.
I bet this single problem alone prevents very many people from using it.
Jeff
stty erase ^H
Why do people insist on posting bug reports to slashdot? If you want your issue to be addressed, there's a proper forum for that.
pop3 is a _very_ simple protocol that allows mail to be read, retrieved, or deleted from a server by a client. It's a had a few features added in later days, and might support simple management like password changing, but that's about it.
The main weakness of pop3 is that it treats the server end as a dumb, unorganised list of messages, and expects all cleverness (mailboxes, sorting, filtering, etc) to be done client side. This means it is a pain to change clients, and nearly impossible to manage one mail account from two clients (e.g. one at home, one at work).
The main strength of pop3 is that it works.
IMAP is a protocol that allows a client to manipulate a server side data store. All the useful information (what messages are read, which folders they are in etc) is on the server, so if you change IMAP clients, all the data is just read of the server, and away you go.
However, AFAIK IMAP is a rather complex protocol. I have never come across a client that implements it very well, all of them struggle with large numbers of messages, handling of attachments and so on. In addition, it's still possible for a client to implement client-side only add-on features that are then incompatibile with other IMAP clients.
Outlook is the only client I've used that seems to handle server-centric email well, and it probably does with in proprietary extensions. Of course Outlook's handling of SMTP is rather dire, but hey.
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Evolution requires a LOT of libraries that haven't been ported to OSX, via Fink or otherwise (to my knowledge). Things like Bonobo, etc. From what I understand, this is more than a trivial recompile to get these kinds of utilites over.
My other computer is your Windows box
That's not the /. effect. The server has been busy for the last week or so. So as usual, Please Use The Mirrors.
Peeps in the UK can go to (ftp|www).mirror.ac.uk, which has a complete and up-to-date mirror of ftp.ximian.com
But, if I may, I would like to make a rather obvious observation. Does it seem that the Ximian group is doing what KDE'ers have been doing all along?
What I mean by that, is the "Windows" look and feel intended for migration for current M$ users?
I'm not slamming them for making stuff LOOK like M$ stuff, but more along the lines of a rather obvious change that seems to be going on, since the early days of gnome.
KDE programmers from the 50,000 foot view on my end have ALWAYS intended for the look and feel to be comfortible for the Windows user to migrate or USE Linux + KDE fairly easily. Again, I'm NOT trying to slam either group. I love both of them.
I really love Evolution, and its definately a viable solution to the security related stuff going on with my Outlook and Office products (which its like the cocaine habit I just can't kill, btw :)
I will start using Evolution for email and integration with my current stuff, to try and fit in like I'm not a M$ user, but what can I say? I have to come out of the closest and admit that I am using Microsoft products at some point right?
Good job Ximian! I like the stuff you guys are doing!
FreeBSD already has Evolution in its ports tree, and in the past people have found that FreeBSD ports have worked fine under OS X (probably since OS X is based on FreeBSD).
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Yes, you could build and run Evolution under Windows, but currently ONLY under Cygwin + an X11 server (this is still local on the Windows box). A Cygwin setup can be accomplished by a newbie. See links below for running GNOME under Cygwin on a Windows box.
Much of GNOME will not build natively, although the libraries themselves are designed to be portable, and GTK is working just fine as Win32 (see GIMP).
There are two kinds of Windows ports... X11 display based, and true "native" Win32. The former is easy to do; the latter is not yet possible (tho you can help!). It's likely that a "native GNOME for Windows" will be much easier, once GTK 2.0 is released.
Links regarding running GNOME or compiling under a local X11 display:c ygwin.html
http://news.gnome.org/976323862/index_html
http://xfree86.cygwin.com/screenshots/
http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley/1596/en/
From the GNOME FAQ, regarding native GNOME for M$ Windows:h tml
http://canvas.gnome.org:65348/gnomefaq/html/x359.
A lot of people want to port GNOME and GTK apps over to Windows. To conquer the enemy they say, you have to enter their territory, then sway them to your culture (OS). ;-)
Yes, you would probably need to get rid of that exchange server too.
Without symbols, I'm told the main binary package is around 6 or 7 MB. This is still bigger than sylpheed, sure, but it also does calendaring, tasks, and addresbook stuff. So... take your pic.
IAAL,BIANLY
1) Linux is, and has certainly, been focused as a server OS. Most of those official statistics may be pure server installations.
2) Even those that use Linux as a desktop may be using it for the novelty/coolness/geek factor, rather than for productivity.
3) Many of the statistics are based on numbers of downloads and other measures, hardly proof that it's really being used.
4) Linux lacks a lot of the quality software that users demand. Thus I find it hard to believe that most people can get away with, never mind prefer, using Linux in lieu of Windows or Macintosh.
5) If Linux's desktop marketshare is so small, why are so few commercial companies porting their desktop software to Linux?
6) There are actually official statistics from IDC and others that show Linux is still a notch or two below Macintosh as a "client" (read desktop) OS. [I don't think they tell the whole picture though...in regards to my other comments]
FYI, I'm a Linux/*Nix/Windows user, not Mac and I have more than half an IQ of a live squirel even. Imagine that!
when will linux itself be come something that non-technical people can use
Last summer, my step-father, fed up with Windows, asked me what I use on my computers - I told him I use Linux (Slackware) and that I'd be happy to come over and install it, and show him how to use it. In August (without my knowledge), he went out and bought Mandrake 8. He wiped windows from the machine, and installed Mandrake.
He uses his computer every day to chat with friends, surf the web, do email, and maintain his journal. He's VERY non-technical, and had no problems using it at all.
When he used windows, I used to receive at least two "support calls" per month from him. When he installed Mandrake, I got a one call about the UI differences (icons in the "k" menu, instead of on the desktop), but since then, he's had no problems, and I have recieved no calls for support.
Judging from this, I'd say that Linux already is something that non-technical people can use - much more so than Windows.
Apple started getting all upset at people copying their user interfaces, and all I can say is that I really hope these Evolution people don't get hit by the same problem - MS telling them to stop copying their user interfaces.
Having said that though, this looks a fantastic piece of software. The peer to peer calender stuff is a much used thing in the Windows world, so it's great to see it running under X too.
Alas gallinaceas de urbe bovis volo
I've used evolution here and there. I've found it to be a nice program. When I used the 0.9 version I found that there were still enough bugs to make me use kmail instead. Overall, I think it will make a great addition to any desktop.
The only drawback that I can see is that it is written in C. I guess I just don't understand why anybody would write something new (unless it needed to be really compact) in a non-object-oriented language. It just seems like for the sake of bug-fixing and keeping the code clean that you'd want an OO approach.
I'm not out to start a flamewar; I guess I just don't understand why a process-oriented language would be used for something this huge (other than the fact that the gnome-libs are C).
Could anybody tell me why this is?
I can't really comment on GNOME, as I don't use it regularly... but I routinely run KMail, Konsole, and Konqueror across an ssh forward with no problems.
Ximian has an answer for that: Red Carpet (usually) works great. Lately they've had some signature deficiencies, and there have been some dependencies that got missed WRT GIMP modules last night.
Beyond that Linux has much more comprehensive on-line documentation than Windows, in my estimation.
Case in point: I bought a Mitsume IDE CD-RW drive for my wife's school. I couldn't make any of the Windows software recognize it as a writer. I swapped it out for an older Mitsumi drive in my Linux box, and it worked just fine! Go figure. (I took the older drive to school, and *it* worked!)
I think a previous poster was right: Windows is thought to be easy because it's ubiquitous. People mistake familiarity for ease. Bruce Tognazzini talks about this idea.
Thanks, for the info, exactly what I was looking for :)
Actually I think I'll see how much load my linux server can take, and try running it under remote X11.
Full agreement on the value of getting the GNOME and GTK apps going on Windows. If Evolution is to be a truly meaningful alternative to Outlook, it has to go where the Outlook users are.
That said, I'd love to know whether Evolution would turn into a COM shell on Windows or whether all of Bonobo would have to be ported? Is Bonobo similar enough to COM these days that the various Evolution modules could be rebuilt as COM objects easily?
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
After two years of hard work and more than 700 thousand lines of code written...
Why the devil does this thing require 700 thousand lines of code? In fact, why is everything related to GNOME so bloated and clunky?
I've been following the development of GNOME for about two years. In my opinion, there is nothing original coming out of that project. They're trying to mimic Windows, and doing a really horrible job at it. (No, that's not a flame or troll. That's my opinion.) My desktops run X and IceWM. I don't run any so-called `desktop environment' because I prefer the command line. And because, when I investigated GNOME and gave it chances several times, it greatly disappointed me. Features? You can implement all the features of GNOME in a fraction of the code. I mean seriously guys, GNOME is more bloated than Emacs! Those `sleepless hackers' did a little TOO MUCH hard work. What happened to `tools, not policy' and the concept of actually doing things efficiently?
After my several bad experiences with GNOME, I have decided that neither the `desktop' nor any component produced by that project have any place on my computers. Nice try, guys. But Microsoft already released the crap you're attempting to rip off. If I wanted slow, buggy, cumbersome and unnecessarily LARGE software, I'd use Windows.
One very important thing to remember about code size is that LOC is a very good indicator of # of bugs. Reducing the number of lines of code (obviously without reducing functionality) is a good way to reduce # of bugs, and also to make your hackers more productive.
There are many higher level languages available, in many different language families. Often high level languages get blasted for being in efficient... but this isn't neccesarily so. For example, with all of the "object" stuff implemented (the hard way) in C, you are paying exactly the same runtime overhead that C++ pays when it has an object. All you are gaining, is the joy of having to implement everything yourself and the possibility of your naming schemes getting out of whack.
I think it's great that Ximian is continuing to survive and is about to "unleash" their masterpiece onto the world. I just wonder how much faster it could have gotten here if they didn't use C.
I find it interesting that the open source community (for the most part), tends to stick with C as the language of choice. Lowest common denominator choices like this are usually not the best.
-Chris
I believe that they were thinking towards being able to port their project far easier to other operating systems and architectures.
Of course, I could be wrong and they may have disregarded standard C and went with Operating Environment Specific libraries instead of developed their own easily ported libraries.
If the above is the case, then I agree with you and they should have definately programmed it all in C++.
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If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
I use Blackbox as well. Why do you need a "desktop environment?" I have a nifty menu to access my apps. I can copy and paste between apps. If I really wanted to I could fix the GTK theme to match my BB theme. My desktop is pretty, clean and fast and no less useful. I know that an "average user" would have problems setting things with text files and things, but why not some tools that edit them for you (as separate apps) rather than this whole "desktop environment" thing. I think this trend is to copy Winblows
The Anti-Blog
Groupware !=email
If you want just email, why the hell would you want to run Evolution? No, kmail, etc. are better alternatives. However, if you want groupware, kmail, etc. will not cut it anymore than Outlook Express would work for a Fortune 500 company...
My point is that groupware is more than an email program and address book. It is an ability to truly integrate several aspects of collaborative work, and email is just a piece of that. Linux needs groupware in order to be successful in those things that are around today. Evolution helps fill this need, but we also need open source groupware servers. Maybe that will be my next project...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Mind you, I have only begun to simply dabble with programming. I have no professional training on the matter.
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.sig seperator
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If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
You can implement all the features of GNOME in a fraction of the code.
Fascinating assertion, captain. I look forward to seeing the release of your far-more-svelte competing project. Let us know when it's out, eh?
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Agreed, except I can see where a project like mp3kult could be handy for mp3 collectors such as myself. I am right now doing everything by hand, using a combination of id3ed, id3ren, mp3rename, mp3_check, and a couple of others and organizing everything in a directory heirarchy. However, once they are all organized, I'd like to get them into a database so that I can easily do searches and things. If I want to see all files with a a bitrate 128 that's very easy with a database, but not as easy with a flat text file or using xmms :) It's bloat yes, and it's un-needed, but I can see where it can be useful for organization. As an aside, the little I've played with mp3kult it seemed pretty snazzy, built in player, built in editing of tags and filenames from the DB, etc etc. Very sweet.
One of the nicer options in Evolution is the ability to share Mbox's with other mail applications such as Mutt (you have to specifically configure it this way -it's not the default). Then you can use "the right tool for the right job." A nice slick gui when you work locally, a clean text based interface for when you SSH in over a slow link.
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
Then you are not the target audience for this. The whole point is that it's supposed to be Outlook-like. Not because Outlook is technically or ergonomically worth copying, but because Outlook is strategically worth copying. Read what Miguel writes -- he's not trying to make the ultimate email reader; he's trying to make an infiltration tool.
There's no point in Unix-heads running this program. It's mean to be run by ex-Dozers, so that they won't notice/complain that they've been switcheroo'd.
Keep using whatever email reader you've always used. You're not supposed to switch to this.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I would like to elaborate a bit on the LOC thing. There's some empirical evidence (forgive me that I omit the proper refs here) for the following two claims:
- regardless of the language, maintainance cost is proportional to the LOC
- regardless of the language, programmers have a more or less fixed productivity measured in LOC/timeunit.
In addition I've seen similar evidence as well as had it confirmed by senior software developers in large software companies that the average production of code throughout the development period of a large software project (>>100KLOC) is less than 1 LOC/day/developer.
If you accept this and use common sense you will realize that using a higher level language will allow you to deliver software both quicker and with fewer bugs. Of course, since time is the limiting factor on most sw. projects, the gained time is used to make more complex systems so new systems are generally as buggy but more feature rich.
BTW. I agree with you that the use of C for most real world projects is misguided these days since much better, equally well performing languages are available. It will be interesting to see how quick e.g. kmail (c++, I think) and mozilla (also C++ + scripting languages) will catch up with evolution.
Jilles
Evolution, in all it's glory, has the potential to be the best email/calendar/etc (read: Outlook clone). With all these email/calendar/etc software products (KMail, phpGroupware just to name two), the open source community doesn't have a replacement for an exchange server. The "Exchange Replacement" HOWTO doesn't cut it. IMAP is great for email, but what about group calendaring (besides passing iCal's back and forth).
How difficult would it be to implement a calendar-type server using an IMAP server? Maybe an iCal extension for your favorite IMAP server.
The ideal software product would even support Microsoft Outlook clients. I'm sure you could write an Outlook driver to hook into the server (I know HP's groupware product,forgot the name, did).
So much for Ximian.
Counting college students making MP3 players for free, Linux wins, but capitalism hasn't seemed to recognize the vast Linux desktop market, if in fact it exists.
The Linux market is hard to make money on because all of the damn Linux users keep insisting on writing their own software and sharing it for free. This will change eventually, as the user base expands beyond the hard core tech set. Things like StarOffice and Evolution will help drive that by expanding the user base, but anyone proposing to sell software on Linux will have to have products that are good enough that they won't be easily duplicated by free software authors.
I myself have bought a dozen commercial linux packages, mostly RedHat distros and Loki games. If the non-technical Linux user population was to grow to Macintosh levels, to say nothing of Windows levels, you'd see plenty of people willing to buy Linux software.
Sure would be nice if we had an LSB, though.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
"Keep using whatever email reader you've always used. You're not supposed to switch to this."
I think you mean, " You're not supposed to switch to this.". Makes more sense in the context to me, anyway.
I only had the NFS locking problem when the server was running RH's kernel 2.4.9-6, which has a bug in the NFS locking code. Upgrading the kernel to 2.4.9-12 solves this (as well as some scurity issues).
See kernel (RHSA-2001-142) for RH 7.1 You'll see links to download kernels for all supported RH versions.
Gordon.
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
evolution's IMAP features are BASIC, most of all, its missing NAMESPACE ! thats very important if you have many shared folders ...
If u want to try a real powerfull albeit commercial IMAP client try mulberry (also for Linux/x86) at http://www.cyrusoft.com/
Despite all the problems with Netscape 4.7x as a browser, it's e-mail client does work very well with IMAP. That's one reason I still keep Netscape around. (For actual web surfing I'm using Konqueror now.)
I was looking at kmail - but it's IMAP support is nonexistant. I would welcome a good gui IMAP client for linux so I could finally stop wasting my precious RAM on the whole of netscape 4.7 (browser and composer and mail reader loaded in RAM all at once - oh joy) just to read mail.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
What do you mean by Web/.com arena? Are you talking about web software developers preferring Linux? Perhaps, given the popularity of Perl, CGI, and such. However, that's a pretty small part of the population. If you're talking about graphics and other related pursuits, I don't buy it. I don't know of a single graphics person that would seriously consider Linux's options on par with that of Windows even, never mind Macintosh (Mac generally being regarded as superior by them).
Maybe they feel they'd much prefer to get it for free, but most Linux users even, in my experience, recognize that there is a real lack of software for the desktop, Free B./Free S. or $$$$. Certainly they'd jump at the opportunity to buy software if it offers them a significantly better option. I know I would. A small percentage of hardcore developers will never buy proprietary/commercial software, but surely they can't be that large a part of Linux's supposed desktop market. The real problem is that developers don't see the market share, plus Linux is a pain in the butt to target for applications compared to Windows/Macintosh.
I don't see what part of my argument is particularly flawed, especially since it can rest on a number of them.
I won't deny that there is little Open Source effort for the Macintosh (although I hear MacOSX is starting to change this, given it's portability with BSD), but this is beside the point. You see tons of efforts for Linux/BSD because they're very much inline with the Open/Free/Hack idealogy. You see some for Windows because of its sheer size. You see few for Mac because its market share isn't even a 1/5th of Windows and because it (traditionally, though MacOSX is changing this) couldn't be more opposed to what Linux/BSD stands for.
My point was simply that Linux has many (perhaps even most) great voids in the application arena that are unfilled by ANY viable option, be it Free, "Free", Closed, or what have you. Mac, on the other hand, has most of the mainstream applications pretty well covered, especially in the graphics arena. This fact calls into question the viability of Linux as a desktop for the user and also strongly suggests that developers don't believe that there is a sufficiently large market out there for Linux. Ergo, it is reasonable to conclude that Linux is not just as big as Macintosh on the desktop, but is, in fact, much smaller.
I agree wholeheartedly with your KDE/Gnome comment. One nice strength of open source is that people don't go out of their way to make things incompatable just because they can. You can run a Gnome app on KDE desktop, and you can run a KDE app on a Gnome desktop - so you don't *have* to choose one to the exclusion of the other. Mix and match to your heart's content. I prefer the Gnome desktop's look, but I like a lot of the KDE project applications (especially Konqueror). So I run Gnome but roughly 50% of the apps up on my screen at any given time are actually from KDE. This doesn't have to be a holy war - the technologies are not mutually exclusive in the way that closed source guis tend to be.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Thus I find it hard to believe that most people can get away with, never mind prefer, using Linux in lieu of Windows or Macintosh.
I use Debian 2.2r4 at home (I do dual-boot to Win98SE to play Descent3, MechWarrior3 and the demos off my PC Gamer CD) exclusively for email, web, letters, etc. I also use it at work exclusively. OpenOffice allows me to interact with MS Office and everything else just works.
All the other computers in the office run some version of Windows (except the server, which is also Debian).
Not only do I "get away with it", I definitely prefer it. Windows drives me up the wall when I try to use it (except for web-browsing. Mozilla0.9.5 is very good, but it still doesn't quite match IE5.5sp2, IMO).
My parents also use Debian on their computer, since they got tired of Win95 crashing on their old computer, and didn't want to spend an extra $180 when I built them their new one 2 years ago. My mom types letters just fine in Abiword, and they use Mozilla for web browsing and to access their hotmail account (I know, but they're loathe to change).
Plus, I have 2 other friends who use Linux exclusively, although they are both uber-geeks. One of them is the sysadmin for a small company with 6 locations and about 30 total employess. They use Debian exclusively, including custom Java apps and a custom scheduling/billing server setup with PostgreSQL (sp?) and they use Squirrel Mail for webmail.
So, yes, some of us definitely prefer Linux.
Unless you can cite an instance of the same individual espousing both these positions, your claims of inconsistency are invalid.
The slashdot crowd, and the linux community in general, are made up of diverse groups of people with diverse viewpoints. Differences of opinion between members of a large group of people is something to be expected, not derided as "inconsistent".
Hi. I'd like to defend my statement and also the company I work for. As a Slashdot reader, I'm sure you are familiar with the statement "My personal political beliefs do not represent those of my employer." Well, that applies here. I'm a free individual person and I have my beliefs. I'm a technical writer and I have a job. Not related.
I am, for the record, not an imbecile. I am also a patriot and I believe deeply in the freedoms that the United States of America offers me as its citizen. I believe especially in my freedom of expression, and my freedom to disagree with the policy of my government, and my freedom to hold pacifist views.
What are those beliefs that I am trying to express on my home page?
I believe that patriotism does not mean that I agree that carpetbombing Afghanistan is exactly the right thing to do. I don't see how B-52s killing Afghans helps the people who died in the WTC attacks.
My statement was not in any way a defense of the terrorists. I'm just trying to point out that people who are surprised by the fact that the US is disliked are missing a great deal of history and context.
To really parse that statement we'll need to define some terms.
By "senseless" I mean to say that it would not be possible to comprehend why such an attack occurred. Because we can look at the motivations of the attackers (a percieved undermining of their culture and religion by the US) and understand what they were, we cannot call the attack senseless.
Their reason was not a *good* reason to blow up a building. There is no good reason to blow up a building and kill thousands of people. Which is why I don't think that the US should be doing it either.
Now, let's talk cowardice. A coward is someone who shrinks from pain and danger, who avoids the call of duty. Well, these hijackers may have heard some twisted duty call, but they were not afraid to die. They were not cowards. You don't hear a lot about those people. You hear about brave heroes, not brave villans. But these were brave villans.
So, if you still think I'm stupid, fine. I'm perfectly willing to have you dislike or disrespect me. More upsetting is the idea that you would turn down perfectly good GPL'ed software just because you disagree with one employee's views.
If you disagree with ESR about gun control, you don't have to stop using his software. If you disagree with RMS about free love and private property, you can still appreciate emacs. So, Red Carpet and Evolution are still great software, even if you don't like the politics of the person who writes the manuals.
Yours,
Aaron Weber
Technical Writer
Ximian, Inc
http://primates.ximian.com/~aaron/
I have an IMAP email box at my current place of employment, and I had never used it before coming here.
If I can help it I will never go back to POP. I read the same email box using Outlook 2K on NT, pine on Solaris, Kmail and Evolution my Linux boxen at home, Netscape Messenger on my SGI and Pocket Outlook on my iPaq.
If more ISPs offered IMAP and people knew the advantages they wouldn't touch POP with a 100ft pole.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Hmm .. a few weeks i did file a bug report about this, and it was commented "feature request", did you include it in the lastest versions ?
The thing that made Unix more pleasing than other operating systems was that its file system had been more cleverly designed.
/home/username/ or "home" to the users. As Unix matured users seldom needed to venture into the rest of the filesystem. Eventually with an advanced distribution the only place the users had to visit was /etc. (This directory was an embarassment to the creators).
/var and they saved images in /usr/local. But there was no order to it. Only chaos and fear.
The creators had the insight to see that users should be given a part of the file system to care for and to tend. That part came to be known as
Although some data files were created in the users' directories to serve them, these files were called dot files and they were not intrusive for users. The visible files were created by the users and pleased the users greatly.
On other operating systems it was not this way. On these operating systems applications saved files in random locations. Executable files were mixed with data files and with libraries, which in turn mixed with other files. And on these operating systems there was no joy; only chaos and gnashing of teeth.
When evolution came it destroyed the beauty that was the Unix filesystem. It created data files and libraries and other files that no one had ever seen before in the users' homes.
Eventually the number of invading files came to outnumber the files that the users had created. Animosity between the two types of files grew until war broke out. The war was bloody and lasted for many years. The users faught bravely but eventually were forced to flee.
The new refugees saved files where ever they could find room. They saved written documents in
The age of darkness had begun.
Outlook sucks and it's one thing I hated about Windows. I've tried so many email clients, both on Windows and Linux, and either their user interface is klunky or it's bug-ridden (one wiped all my mail!). The Linux email clients usually had the edge so I used one of these (I have two boxes side by side, one Win2k and one Linux). Then I discovered The Bat!, which I find to be the best by a large margin. It's not free (30-day free trial) but is so worth the money. Hence I was excited when I heard about an advanced email client called Evolution for Gnome... and groaned out loud when I saw it was an Outlook clone. Why???
I don't buy the "it's easier for people to shift from Outlook" argument. I know plenty of non-techies that had no problem switching from Outlook to Eudora. On the other hand it's good there *is* an Outlook clone for those that really want it. Perhaps some ex-Win32 users will find it a comforting stepping stone. The Evolution team are to be congratulated for providing this. Sadly it's not for me.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
They did.
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If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Not good yet. I seriously considered implementing Evolution as a Outlook replacement (thus removing the final barrier to bouncing windows outa the offices, but alas, it can't do exchange calendaring. Fix that windoze goes. Until then, it can't play proplerly with exchange therefore not so good in many windows shops.
Bummer really.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Amen. Exchange support is really the only thing left, but unadressed, there will be a lot of places that could never go the penguin.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
They are using one of those majikal dot comulator to induce buzzword fields that attract suits thus pumping up 'market penetration' and stock prices. When the price is high enough , they will pull stocks, and anounce that the market is 'adjusting' , thus bringing down civilisation as we know it.
Either that, or they have some clever people doing something or another.
Oh ok. I admit it. I have no idea.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I've seen the site you link before.
However, unlike you I don't get all my information from semi-informed Internet rants. I actually prefer to observe software in action.
It's true that Notes suffers from the same interface wackiness that generally afflicted all Lotus applications. Many of their dialog boxes are textbook examples on how NOT do design dialogs. However users get over its idiosyncracies pretty fast if the system is properly deployed and administered. The majority of UI issues really are more fodder for bellyaching UI purists than a real problem.
The "Hall of Shame" people are pretty much just uninformed, self appointed interface pundits. I think they have a number of good points, but they are also ridiculously ignorant on others. For example, the Notes password dialog box obscures the number of letters in your password; as you type each letter, a random number of "X" appear on the password line. Here is what they have to say about this:
This is not the login window for a weapons targeting system; it is an e-mail application. We wish the designers had spent their time improving the usability of the application itself rather than wasting it on useless diversions.
First of all, I have never heard one user complain about this; it turns out what matters to users is the response of the system to each keystroke, not the count of characters. Users are initially surprised by this, but they get over it immediately. Secondly, exactly what e-mail system are people in charge of targeting weapons supposed to use? Don't you think they might need to protect their passwords? Don't you suppose that they (and other people like financial auditors or intelligence analysts) might need an e-mail system with a high degree of security built in from the start? My third point bears on the second. Notes is not an e-mail system. It is a secure platform for managing the handling and flow of potentially sensitive documents within and between organizations.
E-mail is just another one of these kinds of applications. The Notes e-mail application is written entirely within Notes, and you can create your own applications that move documents around in secure way with the same properly managed trust relationships and authentication and documentation features that Notes mail has. Notes is stupendous overkill for just simple, non-secure e-mail using commodity protocols. Like all overkill applications, there is a certain amount of headache involved with getting the added benefits of features you don't use.
In other words, you should use Notes for the purposes it was intended for, and hire clue-ful administrators who can run the system properly. If you don't need the power of Notes, then hiring and training these people is a waste. Even with them, you have to live with the fact you are hooking up two architecturally different systems to exchange information when you just use Notes for non-secure commodity protocol e-mail. So, I wouldn't recommend Notes for companies looking for a simple MTA/MDA. It will never be a best of breed solution in that space. However, companies way underestimate their need to handle documents in ways that provide security, revision control, review, and authentication.
There are some other examples where these folks have applied a very shallow level of analysis. I won't defend the Notes UI as a whole, which I dislike, but the "Hall of Shame" people have nothing in particular to be proud of. I don't see any of their perfectly designed applications taking the world by storm. Avoiding UI blunders is important, but also getting things right is arguably just as important.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yes, you need to modify a few packages to get them to compile under Cygwin. The link I provided (to .jp) seems to have great documentation on the subject... take a look, it's probably what you're looking for.
KDE 1.x has ready-made packages for Cygwin, and installs painlessly (I've run it for the hey-look-at-this factor). I wish someone could do the same with Gnome 1.4.
yeah people like to install things...
Boss "fix my 'puter, the cusors blinks an hour-glass." Get to his house he's got morpheous running full time dumping god only knows what on to the internet, weather-bug updating the weather every 15 seconds and 5 or 6 other trashy shareware/spyware programs running. The system tray streches 90% across an 1280 display and a cable modem with no firewall and no virus protection running! So I throw in a floppy boot of it and format C: and reload.
ME "you backed up your data before you called me didn't you?"
BOSS "no, did you?"
ME "backup would probably have the Virus too(supressed giggle)"
well after that the 'puter was responsive again, at least for a while. I guess that goes to show you easy to install isn't always a good feature, at least in Widows ME(that was a typo but now I think it appropriate).
And as for hardware almost invariably Linux just picks it up, except for some whacko winmodems and windows only sound cards, most of which don't work on my windows machine either. The rest that do work on my Linux machine about half don't work in Windows 95A P90 machine.
Some people shouldn't be allowed to breed and they especialy shouldn't be allowed to install software on their computers. Often in Windows the difference between a virus and a program is that the virus is self-installing, but the program requires the user to specificaly engage in self-destructive behaviour.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds