Ximian Desktop 2, Evolution Released

An anonymous reader writes "Ximian has released their long awaited Ximian Desktop 2, their popular Gnome-based desktop, and Evolution, their popular email client and calendar program. They can be found on the main Ftp server. You can also check their mirrors."

Comments

Nuh uh

[Anonymous Coward]

Only neither can be downloaded due to dependency problems. Someone needs to check out their installer. The needed files don't seem to be on the mirrors, according to the installer logs.

Re:Nuh uh

[altp]

Use the mirrors, its downloading fine for me.

take off the ftp:// and the path and just give it the server when it lets you choose to use a different server in the installer.

Altp.

Re:Nuh uh

[Anonymous Coward]

After this part the installer just times out, no matter what mirror I select:
id=7 BEGIN 'Downloading http://red-carpet.ximian.com/ximian-connector/redh at-9-i386/packageinfo.xml.gz' (running)

Re:Nuh uh

[tolan-b]

try another mirror. the first mirror i tried claimed that there was no ximian software available for my distro (redhat 8 ;). i tried another and it was fine.

Re:Nuh uh

[mAIsE]

hmm... not very broad support either

Red Hat 7.3, 8.0 and 9.0
SuSE 8.2

I wonder if we can ever expect ximian to support OS-X sometime in the future.

Re:Nuh uh

[coolfrood]

Here's what Nat Friedman had to say about OS X support.
They won't do it since the demand isn't there, and what he says makes a lot of sense

Re:Nuh uh

[Phantasm66]

It was a struggle getting the rpms from the mirror servers today, but what do you expect its just released today. My workstation in the office was a struggle but I did manage to get XD2 fairly easily from my home machine. First impressions are that its very slick and clean, looks very good and feels very good. I will have to give it a go in place of KDE for a while, at least for my Red Hat Installation. Downloading was the only problem, no dependancy problems or anything, the installer seems to pull in everything that it needed. Its a pain though having to rename all of the "E-Mail" menu icons back to "Ximian Evolution" etc, but hey for a normal user it might be nice. Linux could take off on the desktop I think with combinations like Red Hat 9 and XD2 on the go together. If only they could unite their efforts a lot more, maybe we would have a desktop that non-geek mortals are ready to use.

Re:Nuh uh

[hardwire_bogomip]

Heh.. I should be used to this kind of pain, trying to install the bin under gentoo (to save a few hours for something I just wanna peek at) it sees that I have rpm installed, then fails to want to install based on it doesn't know exactly what distribution its on.. Why does this matter?

Re:Nuh uh

[Phantasm66]

As far as I am aware, XD2 only currently supports Red Hat 7.3, 8.0 and 9.0 SuSE 8.2

Re:Nuh uh

[hardwire_bogomip]

Yeah.. it disagreed with my Debian boxen as well.. even tho RPM is available on both.

No time to post....

[Anonymous Coward]

download now. Troll later.

Debian?

[Max Romantschuk]

OK, now when can I apt-get install this thing?

Says the Linux-newbie who wants it all served on a plate ;)

PS. IF that is now Ximian's site is too slow for me to find out.

Re:Debian?

[opk]

You won't. Ximian are dropping support for Debian.

Though they will release the source so someone may decide to compile it and package it unofficially.

Re:Debian?

[jone1941]

wget -q -O - http://go.ximian.com |sh

I would say it doesn't get much easier than that =). If this version is anything like the last it will automagically detect your distribution and use its default package management system.

Re:Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say it doesn't get much easier than that =)

What?! You don't think it can be any easier than using a command line to manually download a shell script from a web server, redirecting the output to stdout and then piping that to a shell in order to begin the real installer?

This is a story about a desktop for Linux, and we have people who think that is easy. Linux has no hope on the desktop. Ever. Just stop now, please.

Re:Debian?

[GC]

and that's a very good reason to poison your DNS cache with my very own go.ximian.com record.

Re:Debian?

[samj]

There is an evolution package which is one of many maintained by Takuo KITAME.

Re:Debian?

[__past__]

If you would read the shell scripts you run from untrusted sources, you would find

bail_nonrpm () {
echo
echo "The Ximian Installer currently only supports RPM-based systems."

Hardly a good replacement for .debs.

Re:Debian?

[BJH]

If this version is anything like the last it will automagically detect your distribution and use its default package management system.

Sorry, no... from the install script:

# Not running on an RPM system
bail_nonrpm () {
echo
echo "The Ximian Installer currently only supports RPM-based systems."
echo "For more information about Ximian's currently supported "
echo "distributions, please visit http://www.ximian.com/."

cleanup
exit 1
}

Re:Debian?

[fea]

Call up Ximian to verify yourself, but a salesman told me when I tried to find out how to purchase Connector, that Ximian would no longer support debian starting with v1.4 of Evolution/Connector. Further, he went on to state that the software, if installed via alien or forced to install via rpm, would not run on Debian due to some type of check for distribution type. I do not understand this at all, but I am not willing at this point to purchase Connector just to find out. The rpms available for evolution 11.4 require glibc 2.3.2, which is not yet ready even under Debian/Sid.

Re:Debian?

[slux]

which is really a shame, because right now, of all the popular distributions available out there, Debian most needs Ximian.

All the others have a pretty nicely set up default desktop that already offers most of the things Ximian has. Even worse, you can't argue that you can get Ximian independent of distribution anymore. They only support three releases of Red Hat and SuSe 8.2. Not supporting even *the* desktop distribution, Mandrake.

We have about 50 Debian desktops around running Ximian Desktop 1. I don't know what we're going to do with them now. GNOME 1.4 is really getting old and I'd like to get rid of it, but debian-desktop is nowhere to be found in woody and the default debian desktop setup leaves a lot to be desired.

Re:Debian?

[CausticWindow]

I'm going to install my laptop today, and were going for Debian unstable.

Would really love to install Ximian Desktop 2 too, anybody got any tips?

Or should I go for Suse instead? (but I love Debian, sniff)

Re:Debian?

[fea]

except for connector which must be purchased

Re:Debian?

[fea]

You might give them a call. If you can do a purchase with them for the desktops you need for your Debian machines, I suspect they will offer it. Their reasoning has something to do with "corporate America" as he explained it to me.

Re:Debian?

[reaper20]

Find the Woody backport for gnome 2.2 on apt-get.org.

You're going to need the XFree backport with it, since the X in Woody doesn't support the goodies that gnome2.2 needs.

This is probably why Ximian won't support woody, they'd have to not only do gnome, but X along with it.

Re:Debian?

[Malc]

Personally, I've never liked GNOME. KDE 3 is available for Woody, although I haven't tried it. I've only used Debian on headless servers you see, and only considered switching from Mandrake on the desktop.

Re:Debian?

[The Tithe]

Ximian had indicated on their site for the past year and a half that they would support Deibian Woody once they released version 2.0 of their Ximian Desktop. Suddenly as of a week or so ago, they have pulled that FAQ item and changed their story to indicate that they won't be supporting Debian anymore.

On another note according to the Ximian Users list Ximian does not plan on providing support for Debian at all, and a group of Spanish developers is going to be releasing the debian distribution separately. (But they are still looking for people to help)

Re:Debian?

[the_2nd_coming]

Debian is easier to tweak than mandrake IMHO....I can turn Debian into a super awsome Multi-media system in a littler under an hour after making a new kernel with the ck patchs. Kernel compiling is very streight forward under debian, not so under RH, SusE or MDK...a ton of crap stops working in those distros if you recompile the kernel.

Re:Debian?

[the_2nd_coming]

and that is a problem? connector is THE product that they sell to companies to support everything else!!

Re:Debian?

[walt-sjc]

... So not only are they "not supporting" debian but they are willing to sabotage it? Yeah, that makes sense, - if you are Microsoft. For some strange reason, I think they will change their position on this after enough pressure. I'd like to see an official company respose to this situation rather than rely on a sales droid.

Re:Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

> wget -q -O - http://go.ximian.com |sh

Jesus christ. Whereas we have P2P clients that can do distributed hash verification checks ... whereas we have https ... this is still what ximian is encouraging us to do?

Way to advance the state of the art.

Re:Debian?

[treke]

Yes it's a problem when you just paid 70 bucks for it and are now finding out that it may not be supported any more on your distribution. This is why closed source software sucks.

Re:Debian?

[treke]

Just a follow up, I called Ximian five minutes ago, and their response was "You can continue to use 1.2." Great.

Re:Debian?

[the_2nd_coming]

you don't need XD2 for connector to work. just evolution and connector.

Re:Debian?

[JerkBoB]

I'm going to install my laptop today, and were going for Debian unstable.

Having been running unstable on my Thinkpad T30 for about 6 months now, I would highly recommend installing sarge (testing) instead of unstable. I have had GNOME get pretty screwed up a few times while the maintainers sorted out packaging issues.

About a month ago I changed my apt sources to grab testing instead of unstable, and I think testing has mostly caught up to where unstable was when I switched. I'm still thinking about starting anew with sarge (don't really like the way I partitioned this disk).

Re:Debian?

[stefanlasiewski]

They only support three releases of Red Hat and SuSe 8.2. Not supporting even *the* desktop distribution, Mandrake.

Mandrake is a find distro, but I'm not sure if it's *the* destktop distro any longer. May be a location thing, but I don't know anyone who uses Mandrake. Plus, Mandrake Corp. is bankrupt, and may not survive.

I know many places that use RedHat or SuSE, and a few that use Debian (But not at the enterprise desktop level. Debian users are usually some people daring to be different in a Windows office).

If you were a strugling business trying to sell Linux desktops to the corporate environment, the most profitable path is to support the distro's with the biggest user base and the best corporate support. Today, that's SuSE and RedHat.

Re:Debian?

[malsdavis]

"OK, now when can I apt-get install this thing?"

possibly, your average computer however would say "wtf is apt-get?! and why am I having to run programs with wierd names from an 80's style command line when all my window's software automatically installs itself graphically?"

Linux is never going to get anywhere unless your average computer user can install stuff without having to read a manual or use an ugly command line, its the 21st century, not the 1980's.

The whole process (from install to uninstall) has to be completely graphical with simple buttons to press! Stupid names like apt-get don't help either

Good to see

[barcodez]

It's good to see that someone is still trying to give MS a run for their money on the desktop. This looks like an excellent piece of software. This release is the light at the end of the tunnel for those trying to use Linux on the desktop within Microsoft-centric office environments.

Re:Good to see

[tolan-b]

absolutely. gnome 2 was a revelation for me, and i loved the look of gnome 2.2 though there wasn't any quick and easy way to install it so i haven't got round to it.

xd2 looks to be another significant step in the direction gnome is already headed in, which can only be a good thing imho.

i used to be a big fan of kde, then i saw the light ;)

Re:Good to see

[__past__]

I like the look of Gnome too, but after trying Gnome2.2 for a while now, I have to say it's probably not for me. And no, KDE is not the alternative.

What I miss most is integration of the loads of programs available for Gnome. Wouldn't it be nice if MrProject and the Evo calendar were linked in some way? Or if I could use the same filters for mail and news? Or look up people I meet in IRC in a global address book, and send them a mail or something?

Not to mention extensibility. How the f**k do I register spam mails with bogofilter from Evo? (I don't really know if it's impossible. The documentation doesn't mention it, but then, it thinks that using multiple mail accounts is "advanced", so scripting is probably beyond the scope of it (or Evolution). Well, at least it has documentation, unlike half of the other appps I use.)

Funny thing is, the best integrated environment I found yet is Emacs. Granted, it isn't that visually pleasing, and not exactly quick to learn, but once you get the hang of it, everything just works like it should. Gnus handles mail, news and other data sources transparently (including slashdot, btw), the erc IRC client integrates the BBDB contact database, I can listen to MP3s from the directory editor etc. pp. In short, a complete, well-integrated, productive desktop environment that even happens to work without X, for those SSH moments.

The only things I miss are a useable web browser (w3 sucks), an ICQ client and, more than anything, multithreaded Elisp. Or rather, drop Elisp and use a modern Common Lisp as the backend - CLISP, while not the best CL implementation of the world, would be appropriate, scince it's GPL and very portable. Writing an Elisp compat layer in CL seems possible, if not trivial. But of course, this is never going to happen.

Re:Good to see

[the_2nd_coming]

ummm...did you even read the Ximian interview on OS NEWS?

Ximian has tightly integrated every app from OO.o to Mozilla to cups etc....and any gnome app that is HIG-ified will have the smae look and feel as the desktop.

Re:Good to see

[__past__]

Yes, I did. I didn't talk about "integration" in the sense of "apps look similar and have the same menu structure", but as in "apps use a common set of data, flowing freely from one app to the other, thereby making one app a natural extension of the other".

Ximian might be better there than vanilla gnome, but I didn't see anything revolutionary. (And I cannot test it myself scince they happen to not support my OS of choice.) Still a bunch of monolithic, uncooperative apps, even if a polished bunch.

Re:Good to see

[steveha]

You want lots of integration. Give it time; it will come. The free software world is made up of a bunch of unconnected projects; people add features on. One of these days, people will start adding the integration features. GNOME 2.x certainly has the plumbing for the sort of app-to-app communication you are wishing for; in fact, if you look at what the initials G-N-O-M-E stand for, it's the Network Object Model that will make this integration possible.

Read Miguel's famous rant "Let's Make UNIX not Suck".

As for how to train bogofilter which emails are spam, may I humbly recommend you read my own article on the Linux Journal web site:

Fight Spam with SpamProbe

I used SpamProbe but you can use the same approach to use BogoFilter.

steveha

Re:Good to see

[Kashif Shaikh]

I like the look of Gnome too, but after trying Gnome2.2 for a while now, I have to say it's probably not for me. And no, KDE is not the alternative. What I miss most is integration of the loads of programs available for Gnome. Wouldn't it be nice if MrProject and the Evo calendar were linked in some way? Or if I could use the same filters for mail and news? Or look up people I meet in IRC in a global address book, and send them a mail or something? KDE is not in the same boat. While you may get a consistent widget-look with most of the major applications(open office, evo, mozilla,etc) /w Gnome, KDE has a much tighter integration with many of its components. This is because of Kparts and you can see this easily with Konqueror: You can open a pdf, browse a webpage, open a Konsole all in one window. They even have a mozilla kpart, so you can integrate mozilla into konqueror(though it's using kdebindings to glue non-kde/gtk apps). I'm pretty sure Gnome has something like this, but I never got past Nautilus and it's clunky integration into Gnome's desktop-environment.

Re:Good to see

[Anonymous Coward]

How the f**k do I register spam mails with bogofilter from Evo?

This is very easy since Evo's filters provide an option to filter based on the return code from an external program.

Re:Good to see

[the_2nd_coming]

nothing is revolutionary in the world of the gui.

the invention of the gui was revolutionary.....the invention of the personal computer (IBM, comadore, apple, etc) was revolutionary.

most things in the world are only evolutionary.

Re:Good to see

[HiThere]

It's quite reasonable that EMACS should be the "best integrated package". They've been working on it a lot longer than the new kids on the block. But this shows in the "not as visually pleasing". Some of EMACS design decisions were frozen in the days when 64KB was a lot of memory (well, so I exaggerate...you get the idea). And those design decisions are only revisited when a section of code is being rewritten.

It's nice to be able to do everything with the keyboard. It's not so nice to be forced to. And multiple windows are good things. So is directory listings that allow you to select files rather than needing to remember them. (Yes, I seem to remember that there's some way of doing this in EMACS, but I can't remember it when I try to use it, whereas any GUI based editor I can pick up and just start using without any particular training.)

Re:Good to see

[__past__]

What I'm talking about would be a revolunionary change for Gnome, not for the world of the GUI. As I said, even Emacs comes surprisingly close. Other past and present systems are far ahead, for example Genera or Squeak.

Re:Good to see

[__past__]

Of course this is useful. That's why Emacs has menus, multiple windows and stuff, after all :-)

Seriously, Emacs is obviously limited by its history. Elisp, for example, is a really shitty, old-fashioned, slow Lisp dialect, and you understand why this is bad when you start running two Emacs sessions in parallel because otherwise Gnus would prevent you from doing any work while downloading mails and doing all kinds of stuff to them, slowly.

However, even if too limited, the foundation is still stronger than what Gnome, KDE etc. came up with yet. More importantly, refactoring Emacs from scratch, or starting something completly new, is simply not economical - the power of Emacs is not only because it has some good ideas at its core, but because people have invested hundreds of man-years applying these ideas. Throwing that all away is plain stupid. So I guess we are stuck at the moment with several unsatisfying options. :-/

Yes, but

[jkrise]

1. Does SCO certify that this does not include source from MS Outlook, leaked by HP :-) ?

2. Why use a client that apes Outlook behavior, when better faster thinner clients exist.

3. How much RAM does Evolution need now, for decent response? Last I tried on my 64MB RAM system, it took 72 seconds to load. About 16 seconds slower than Outlook. And 60 seconds slower than Mozilla mail.

Re:Yes, but

[Anonymous Coward]

and 71.9 seconds slower than mutt!

Since switching away from Windows, I will never again understand the use of graphical email clients... it's like using your TV as a letter opener IMHO ;)

Re:Yes, but

[Flabby Boohoo]

64MB RAM? Now I understand why you were modded funny!

Re:Yes, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, you are so right! Gotta love {fetch,proc}mail+mutt, and a little notifyer in irssi.

Re:Yes, but

[cjjjer]

2. Why use a client that apes Outlook behavior, when better faster thinner clients exist.

You obviously have never trained end users. The kind that when then turn on their computers expect to see it a certain way. This probably accounts for 75% of the corporate end users. The only way Linux and desktops alike will get more acceptability in todayâ(TM)s market is to mimic Windows as closely as possible. Most of the end users that I have trained are either terrified or disgusted with the fact that they have to learn the new features of an application/OS. For the most part IT/Management knows this and don't want a bunch of irate workers on their hands. Unless IT/Management wants to train its staff all over again the money then save by moving to Open Source they will need to cover the costs of re-training.

Re:Yes, but

[mydigitalself]

you mean the linux email client that has microsoft exchange connectors so that users don't have to run licensed copies of windows on their desktops. hmmm....

i also second the motion regarding end-user training. you just try giving pine to our sales guys and see what happens...

Re:Yes, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Any program that takes 72 seconds to load HAS SERIOUS DESIGN FLAWS.

Let's face it: There are BAD PROGRAMMERS OUT THERE.

Re:Yes, but

[Anonymous Coward]

To reinforce parent posting: keep in mind that these are the same corporate users who write job descriptions that say you have to have 3 years of experience with Windows Server 2003.

Re:Yes, but

[steve_l]

I see your point, but what irritates me w/ Evo is that it repeats so many of the UI mistakes of outlook.

Case in point: why doesnt the calendar highlight *in* the day view which day is today, when is 'now' (i.e. a coloured line) and when is past (i.e. a darker gray). If you are trying to make an appointment over the phone, it is too easy to accidentally make that appointment in the past, because the GUI doesnt highlight past/present/future properly.

At least with Evo I can fix such details; with outlook you have to be grateful for what you get.

Re:Yes, but

[noselasd]

So basically _any_ software out there have serious problems ? I mean, it's _hard_ to find software that starts up fast on my 486/8mb ram..

Re:Yes, but

[Raul Acevedo]

Why use a client that apes Outlook behavior, when better faster thinner clients exist.

Evolution is not just an email client. I don't know of any other clients that support integrated calendar and mail functionality, plus LDAP, vCard, and Palm synchronization. I also don't know any other client that supports integration with Microsoft Exchange (even if that costs extra).

Re:Yes, but

[Arandir]

Except that you have to run licensed copies of connector.

Re:Yes, but

[psavo]

Since switching away from Windows, I will never again understand the use of graphical email clients... it's like using your TV as a letter opener IMHO ;)

You, my friend, obviously don't run a digital photography club.
I do.

Re:Yes, but

[Anonymous Coward]

you must not get much email... I have multiple mailboxes with over a gig of mail in them, and many others with 500+ megs.

I'd like to see mutt beat evolution performance-wise with those kinds of mailboxes. no way charlie. Evolution has every other mail client I've tried beat with that volume of mail beat.

last time I tried to open one of my ~500 meg mailboxes with mutt, it took *minutes*. Evolution took under a second. (pine is equally if not slower than mutt).

so what if Evolution takes a little longer to startup? (which, btw, is no longer the case with 1.4 - or, at least 1.3.92, I haven't finished downloading XD2 + Evo 1.4.0 yet)

as far as memory footprint, opening those gigbyte mbox files with Evolution vs pine/mutt, Evolution comes out ahead of the pack :-)

of course... with smaller mbox files, my guess is it doesn't. but only because of all the X11 and GNOME libraries that it pulls in.

Oh, and when I was counting memory usage, I was counting *total* memory usage (-RSS) of Evolution (meaning w/ calendar and addressbook usage). If someone could tell me how to subtract the memory usage used by the addressbook and calendar, I'd love to see how badly Evolution puts mutt/pine to shame then ;-)

To sum up: mutt and pine take MUCH longer to load a large mailbox and use more memory than Evolution.

Kudos to the Evolution team! Maybe the mutt/pine developers could learn a few things from these guys ;-)

Re:Yes, but

[Anonymous Coward]

the problem was that each component was a separate executable, hence the startup time was of 7 or 8 programs:

evolution, evolution-mail, evolution-addressbook, evolution-calendar, evolution-alarm-daemon, evolution-executive-summary, wombat (and maybe others?)

when you think about that, 72 seconds becomes 10 seconds per app? not nearly so bad.

oh, and even on my celeron 400 - it never took 72 seconds that I can remember. maybe 30 seconds, but even that sounds like an overexaggeration.

but now with 1.4.0, it loads as fast as pretty much any other gui app out there that does anything significant. takes maybe 2 or 3 seconds on my celeron 400.

Re:Yes, but

[mydigitalself]

cheaper than windows + office....
ximian has to somehow maintain a business.

Re:Yes, but

[Anonymous Coward]

I get it open in about 2 seconds here. It helps of curse to have a 1.2Ghz machine and 512 MB ram. Bu it is much faster than its predecessor for sure.

Evolution was made to work with exchange and there are not other clients for linux that offer that functionality to that degree.

I think RAM is now too cheap for people to always complain. Run mutt if you can not afford the RAM for evolution. It is not made for people with 486's. People just do not get it.

Source

[riggwelter]

I expect it's just an oversight, but as yet there are no source tarballs on either ftp.ximian.com or ftp.gnome.org (well, my local f.g.o mirror, can't get to the real thing at the mo...)

Re:Source

[brianmf]

Q: How do I get the Ximian Desktop 2 source code?
A: Ximian Desktop 2 source code will be available June 9th, 2003. This includes all source code for Ximian Desktop 2 shipped under the General Public License (GPL). Source code is not provided for third party components shipping with XD2 Professional Edition (such as Macromedia Flash).

Re:Source

[luge]

Not quite an oversight; more like a serious fuckup on the mirror syncing that was only discovered very late last night by some very, very tired code monkeys. It'll be corrected once we have bandwidth again. [By fixed I mean 'we'll put out .srpms', since we aren't upstream and hence have never released tarballs.]

What you really want anyway is http://patches.ximian.com, which still has some kinks (some missing patches, we can't quite tell why) but should have all the changes in much-easier-to-digest patch form.

Re:Source

[riggwelter]

Ummm, it is June 9th 2003, I'm not looking for source code to non-free programs, but source to the GPL Evolution would be nice when the binaries are available...

Re:Source

[AlCoHoLiC]

You're right (or I'm as blind as you). I've seen "sources" subdirectory under xd2/redhat-9-i386 (at least on ftp.mirror.co.uk) but it's not there at the moment.

Ximian promised to deliver sources today so I guess they've couple of hours to comply. I'm not trolling but I expect former GNU posterchild (Miguel) and his company to follow GPL religiously.

Re:Source

[luge]

FWIW, you can always get all the source to Evolution from cvs.gnome.org.

Re:Source

[alitaa]

its supposed to be here

"Popular" ?

[joestar]

I though that "popular" meant a lot of people are using it. And I don't know *anyone* (including family, real friends, and hundred linux friends over the net) using Ximiam tools. (sorry, it's just that I have a big Karma, so I thought it was an amusing idea to have it decreased a bit by saying something true :-) )

Re:"Popular" ?

[Ami Ganguli]

I'm not sure about numbers, but it's certainly popular with me. I've been waiting for months for XD2.

Red Carpet has been unable to download the packages for the last few hours, so I guess there are enough people like me to swamp their servers.

Just because your crowd doesn't use something, doesn't mean it's not popular. I don't know anybody who uses a Mac, much less Apple's new music thingy, but apparently that's popular too. Go figure.

Re:"Popular" ?

[tolan-b]

I know plenty of people using Ximian tools.

Mainly Evolution, but also a few XD users.

Re:"Popular" ?

[afidel]

Trust me they are used pretty widely in the corporate linux market. Red carpet is a great rollout manager and Evolution is THE email client to use under linux if you have to talk to Exchange (requires Ximian connector which is not free software, but it truely rocks).

Re:"Popular" ?

[5prite]

Personally I have used Ximian Evolution before, and I think that it is pretty easy to use (i.e. very gentle learning curve).

However, during my waiting for the GTK2 version of Evolution, I have switched to mutt for various reasons:

1. I am tired of waiting it to fire up (~5-10 seconds on my P2 350MHz)
2. I wanna try something new
3. More powerful :)
4. Most importantly, I know that text-based oriented interface is faster to use when you are on it

My thinking is that GUI applications aids people to migrate to Linux (who wanna invest half a month to learn before you know how to check your inbox?). As users has built up more and more knowledge on Linux (kernel + applications), s/he will start looking at alternatives (possibly text-oriented interface) which suits his/her needs better.

This will also answer those comments like:

• GUI is useless
• real men use mutt/[insert your favorite text-based mail client here]

Although I am using mutt now, without Evolution, I will not even know how to use mutt now. I appreciate a newer version being released, although I know I will not use it.

Re:"Popular" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Evolution? Pshaw! I tried it as a drop-in solution for my corporate mail client to get me off of NT. Too bad Japanese support FUCKING SUCKS! Guess I'll be stuck with NT a little longer, until you open sores wankers realize that ENGLISH 'AINT THE ONLY FUCKING LANGUAGE ON THE PLANET.

Wankers.

Re:"Popular" ?

[luge]

Well, our press release points out we had roughly a million and a half installations of Ximian GNOME 1.4. And we had... well, we had a whole lot of downloads this morning well before it hit any community news sites, from people sitting and reloading ftp.ximian.com all night. :) So, I guess 'popular' is totally subjective, but I think it's fair to say there is at least some interest out there. :)

Re:"Popular" ?

[rit]

Open source relies upon the community to contribute. Ximian is a Boston based company employing primarily English speaking programmers. It's not that we think the only language in the world is English - it's that many of us don't speak Japanese.

It's up to people who use the product and find a need for locale support like Japanese to contribute. If you find it lacking, please by all means HELP OUT!

Your help will be welcome and the products will be the better for it.

The other option is to whine about it, hoping someone else contributes better Japanese locale support... Or you could help out yourself.

Re:"Popular" ?

[Wyzard]

That's interesting, because I currently use Mutt, and am considering switching to Evolution. :-)

My reasons are, support for scheduling, and the fact that it looks nicer and will make a good impression on friends who aren't Linux users but are interested in Linux. That said, though, I'd like to retain "compatibility" with Mutt if at all possible, so that I can use Mutt to read new or old mail without interfering with the operation of Evolution.

btw, I think Evolution would be a bit more "popular" versus Outlook if there was a Windows version -- I have a friend who'd switch to Evolution in an instant if he could, but he's not ready to move to the Linux/UNIX platform yet.

Re:"Popular" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another option is to use a product where localization is better. I had big problems with Redhat 8 in this regard. The tree weird characters that me and my fellow citizens use in every other word we type did not show up well in its hybrid KDE-desktop. I got tired that something so essential (for me at least) was not working properlty out of the box. Last week I changed distribution: it was the first I payed for, Suse 8.2 Professional, and it looks much better.

Localization is something that is very essential. In -96 it was fun to tweak and fix, about -99 it just became annoying, and by this time, if it does not work, I see no reason to pay for a product that does not implement it properly. I expect current Linux distributions to be more mature by now.

Re:"Popular" ?

[5prite]

[quote]
My reasons are, support for scheduling, and the fact that it looks nicer and will make a good impression on friends who aren't Linux users but are interested in Linux.
[/quote]

I just use the email feature of Evolution only, so I want to move to mutt for speed reason. :)

[quote]
That said, though, I'd like to retain "compatibility" with Mutt if at all possible, so that I can use Mutt to read new or old mail without interfering with the operation of Evolution.
[/quote]

Since Evolution stores mail in standard mbox format, I guess it will not be hard for you to do a mailbox which is readable by both Evolution and mutt.

Re:"Popular" ?

[passthecrackpipe]

Trust you? why? Do you have *any* credentials in the corporate linux market? The fact that GNOME and Sun are now practically joined at the hip, and that RedHat has GNOME switched on on all their serves by default does *not* mean they are somehow an unstoppable force on the corporate desktop.

On the other hand, I have designed and managed about 8 large scale pilots (think thousands of seats) for linux on the desktop, and have been involved with many more, all aimed at the Corporate/Government market. So far, for every single one of them, KDE has been the top choice of both admins as well as users, for a tremendous amount of reasons. The Ximian/GNOME team are really not heading in the right direction, when it comes to desktop design, and they have pretty much made sure that the design decisions that went into XD2 will scare off any serious systems manager, or at the very least, give them the same amount of lock-in and dependency that Ms offers them today.

The Ximian Connector you so highly tout only delivers value to Ximian, not to the end user (it enables Ximian to get more users on Evolution). I can easily connect and collaborate with Exchange servers, in a variety of ways, including a fat-client, if I would wish to do so -- without having to use Evolution, *or* suffer a major loss of functionality. Evolution, besides being a badly-implemented Outlook Clone, does not really offer me any unique solutions, and combined with the tight GNOME coupling, again makes for an uncompelling argument. Moreover, any application that requires a 3k killscript, just to get the system back to a usable state when (not if, when) the application crashes, need to be taken out back and shot. several times. Just check out /usr/bin/killev for the joys of CORBA programming . Years after CORBA is dumped in just about any enterprise as an archaic, slow-moving and basically retarded piece of middleware (mainly due to design-by-comittee politics, not technology, I hasten to add), the GNOME/XIMIANS dudes and dudettes jump and say: "Hey! how cool! lets use CORBA. Sometimes I really wonder how much Microsoft is paying Ximian.

As roll-out managers go, Red Carpet (as well as the Red Hat Network) would only truly entice ex Microsoft Menu Monkeys and admins of the braindead vegetable type. There are SO MANY good application admin solutions for Linux, that could tie in with your overall enterprise management strategy if you wanted to, that the use of what is, essentially, a massive security hole, should be termed a capital crime. So far, all the stuff cooming out of the GNOME camp has been aimed at doing away with the strengths of the Linux platform and the weaknesses of the Microsoft Platform: less configuration options, those config options that are available are tucked away in a "registry" type, binary databse, outlook look-alikes, doing away with text-based management and the tremendous amount of flexibility that gives you, and now with XD2, they even set OpenOffice.org to save by default in MS formats!! how fscked up is that?!?

So, to make a long rant short, I reiterate my original remark: What are you credentials in the corporate linux market so that I should "trust you" at your word, as you ask?

O yeah, before anyone freaks out, I have nothing to do with KDE project, and have used GNOME and KDE for about the same amount of time. I am now a happy KDE user, most of the time. And no, this is not a troll, or anything like that. It is honest opinion.

Re:"Popular" ?

[Amomynos Coward]

It's popular as in "nerds are popular among nerds". Oh but I don't have any extra karma! ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H

Re:"Popular" ?

[IamTheRealMike]

What, out of a hundred Linux users, NONE of them use Evolution?

Going just from the people I know, I can say that Evolution has something like 50%, maybe higher market share.

Re:"Popular" ?

[passthecrackpipe]

installations, or downloads? and is that including me? I installed Evo, as well as XD1 a few times, but am no longer using it. I imagine there are quite a few others like me that have done the same. Do you including re-installs in that count? When you quote stats, could you please be clear? thanks.

Re:"Popular" ?

[BJH]

Well, to be fair, Japanese support under the English version of Outlook ain't so hot either (see what happens when you receive an ISO-8859-1 message and use Japanese in your reply...).

Still, you do have a point - Evolution is basically unusable as a day-to-day mail client for multi-byte languages. Personally, I use Sylpheed, which is getting closer and closer to that magic 1.0 mark.

Re:"Popular" ?

[IamTheRealMike]

So far, for every single one of them, KDE has been the top choice of both admins as well as users, for a tremendous amount of reasons.

.... which you haven't listed.

The Ximian/GNOME team are really not heading in the right direction, when it comes to desktop design, and they have pretty much made sure that the design decisions that went into XD2 will scare off any serious systems manager

.... which you also don't list.

or at the very least, give them the same amount of lock-in and dependency that Ms offers them today.

I think you're nick is well chosen. You're smoking some serious crack. I suspect this might be a well crafted troll. But whatever.

The Ximian Connector you so highly tout only delivers value to Ximian, not to the end user

In that case, why do people buy it?

I can easily connect and collaborate with Exchange servers, in a variety of ways, including a fat-client, if I would wish to do so -- without having to use Evolution, *or* suffer a major loss of functionality.

Again. You don't support this assertion.

Moreover, any application that requires a 3k killscript

.... which it no longer requires.

Years after CORBA is dumped in just about any enterprise as an archaic, slow-moving and basically retarded piece of middleware

You are ignorant. CORBA is used in many back office applications, especially powering high end e-commerce sites. DCOM, which is similar to CORBA except less standard and poorly specified, is deployed throughout the Win32 platform, and people all over the world use it every day (via installshield no less).

those config options that are available are tucked away in a "registry" type, binary databse

Yeah, I'm pretty sure you are a troll. GConf is not binary based. Oh, and by the way, simplification of the UI has ranked very highly amongst "things we need" for IT managers to deploy Linux on the desktop.

they even set OpenOffice.org to save by default in MS formats!! how fscked up is that?!?

Corp rollouts would only do it themselves anyway. Or do you really want Mary in marketing ringing up every other day asking why her friend can't open the report she just sent?

I am now a happy KDE user, most of the time. And no, this is not a troll, or anything like that. It is honest opinion.

No, it's a troll. It's made up purely of unsubstaniated opinion with no basis in reality whatsoever, put forth in a flamebait style. It reads like you're trolling for hits. So here you are. Hope you enjoy it.

Re:"Popular" ?

[fea]

I just found out that Connector would not be available for my Debian box. The corporates here say to use Connector for the Exchange interface. What other tools are available for interfacing with M$ outlook-exchange ? Please reply to freelsjd@ornl.gov

Re:"Popular" ?

[afidel]

My credentials are that I was the linux expert on the deskside support team that supports Cisco Systems. When Cisco decided to go with Exchange for internal reasons we started looking for a good linux solution. We needed to support not just email, but calandering as well because all calandering was thankfully being moved off of their previous "solution" (it sucked equally on all platforms). We could not use POP3 for email because it broke the model of some of the backend software that was being grafted around Exchange so it was either IMAP or MAPI, and when you add in the need for calendering support the only viable solution was Ximian connector+Evolution. Setting the default save option to MS formats makes sense in a mixed environment because then the user does not have to think about resaving the document before sending it to a collegue. Btw, this was for a couple thousand seats of linux desktops in a mixed Solaris/Win2k/RH environment.

Re:"Popular" ?

[golgotha007]

On the other hand, I have designed and managed about 8 large scale pilots

about? so you mean 7? or maybe 3?

i have set up linux development teams for 2 corporate customers. I have used Ximian gnome and Red Carpet for both and they work superbly.

The Ximian Exchange Connector is not designed to be used on every single desktop in the company (although it could). Since many developers use linux, they aren't able to collaborate with the corporate windows folks. Ximian Connector allows them to connect to Exchange without having to install VM Ware to run Outlook, this saving them from tons of bloat.

Evolution, besides being a badly-implemented Outlook Clone, does not really offer me any unique solutions, and combined with the tight GNOME coupling, again makes for an uncompelling argument.
god, i guess i feel like feeding the troll today... but Ximian Evolution has some very notable unique solutions. Virtual folders and extensive search capabilities are to name just a few. yes, Evolution is coupled with Gnome fairly well. you don't like this coupling, so you choose Outlook instead, which isn't coupled to anything, right? jeez... i'm actually wasting my time debunking all the FUD in this parent..

Moreover, any application that requires a 3k killscript, just to get the system back to a usable state when (not if, when) the application crashes, need to be taken out back and shot. several times.

when Evolution crashes, the system doesn't become unstable. Evolution is just broken until a kill script is activated.
However, have you seen what happens when Outlook crashes? of course, everyone here has. the entire system is unstable and generally needs a reboot. no kill script can save the OS.

oh, if you're complaining about save options, etc, then you really haven't checked out gconf-editor, have you? thought not.

based on your post, i would sure as hell trust the original post than this parent, that's for damn sure.

Re:"Popular" ?

[GooberToo]

Exchange so it was either IMAP or MAPI

You mean it was either IMAP or DCOM or DCOM+MAPI. MAPI is not a line-wire protocol. It's an API. ;)

The pedant in me was just screaming to get out...sorry. ;)

Re:"Popular" ?

[gol64738]

jesus christ, how the hell can this troll be posting at 2? he's already trolled this discussion a number of times. someone please shut him up. where's my mod points when i need them?

Re:"Popular" ?

[damiam]

I am tired of waiting it to fire up (~5-10 seconds on my P2 350MHz)

FWIW, Evolution 1.4 screams. 1.2 took about 5 seconds to startup on my dual-Athlon 2200 box, and 1.4 takes half a second.

Re:"Popular" ?

[mark_lybarger]

please go back to your crackpipe. as the OP mentioned, it's a press release. thus, it's expected to be biased both in wording and its statistical presentation. basically you can gather that it's a fairly large project that is widely used. users, installs, downloads, whatever.

Re:"Popular" ?

[daniel borgmann]

Half a second? You mean when it's still in memory, right? Half a second would be a bit too good to be true. ;) You couldn't even admire the beautiful splashscreen!

Re:"Popular" ?

[BlackHawk-666]

That said, though, I'd like to retain "compatibility" with Mutt if at all possible, so that I can use Mutt to read new or old mail without interfering with the operation of Evolution.

Just keep your mail on your mail server and use IMAP to connect to it. Then you can use Mutt, Evolution, KMail, Netscape/Mozilla or even Outlook ot get at your mail. Best of all, you can access it while you are at work too ;-) I presonally use Kmail when I'm at home, Mozilla if I have to boot Windows for a bit, Pine when I shell in, and Mozilla from work (since Outlook acted all pissy about it for no good reason). IMAP means enjoying your mail no matter where you are.

You can also move all your contacts and stuff into an LDAP server for bonus points. Now I have one address book which I can use wherever I am with all my email clients on any OS. Only downside, I have yet to find a decent client to update that LDAP address book...anyone got some recomendations?

Re:"Popular" ?

[Skeezix]

And I have 5 friends who have been waiting eagerly for this release, and I know hundreds more "internet" friends just as eager. So there's your counter-testimony. In the Linux community, Ximian is quite popular. Some of our staff at work are looking into switching from having two workstations (Sunblade and NT) to just one running XD2. I don't think we're alone.

Re:"Popular" ?

[passthecrackpipe]

Well, I expected to be flamed to bits for this post, but am also prepared to back up my claims. I am, however, at work, and that means my replies may not be as comprehensive as I would like them to be.
you asked me to list some reasons as to why KDE consistently comes out on top of the pilots I have lead or been involved with. Well, there are many. Polished, looking good, fit for purpose, easy to configure, easy to manage, sane backend architecture and infrastructure are some of the ones that most frequently come up. On the other hand, GNOME is frequently found to be more robust in the individual components (whereas KDE is found to be more robust overall.) Those are just some of the reasons. I have well over 600 pages of documentation that back up this fact. Some are public domain. Most are not, sadly.

You ask me to list the reasons why XD2 will scare off any serious sysadmin. Here goes a brief list. XD2, as well as GNOME, employ a philosophy that "less is more" however, that concept is, initself, seriously debatable. Less is more may work for a sub-class of your end-user base (task-workers, typically 65% of the linux-deployable desktop users), but there are users where this doesn't work at all (knowledge-workers, about 30% of the linux-deployable users. Typcally, about 80% of a given Fortune 100 company is "linux deployable" on the desktop. These are, of course, generalisations and simplifications, but the point is clear). So at the end of the day, you will end up with a situation where you need a fast, flexible, scalable and manageable approach to administering and customising the desktop environment. different users have different needs, and these needs change form company to company. For Ximian to assume that "they know best for all" is ridiculous.

As th whether or not i use drugs, I don't. My knick is a reference to the Slashdot madness, and my willingness to participate in that. You, on the other hand, do not address the issue of lock in, that most certainly exists.

People buy the Ximian Connector for the same reasons MS is the market leader today: smart marketing, and selective education. I think we can at least both agree that the Linux desktop, in whatever form, is often the better solution to the MS desktop, although I suspect our reasons will probably significantly differ. Nevertheless, MS has the vast majority of market share. Go Figure! why do they buy that?

As to supporting an unix client on exchange: IMAP, SMTP, LDAP, WebDAV. etc. etc. They actually work, you know?

As long as the killscript ships with the default distro it comes with (in this case, redhat) I am working on the asumption it is required.

You can call me many things, but ignorant I am most certainly not. I may not share your opinion, and you may love CORBA while most enterprises don't use it, but still, that does not make me ignorant. CORBA is dying. Your sleigh of hand with mentioning lesser implementations still don't make CORBA much more alive. Moreover, you don't support your assertion that CORBA is alive and kicking. Why don't you search for "CORBA developer" and "J2EE developer" on any jobsite. or "CORBA Architect" and "J2EE Architect". That usually gives you an idea of how wanted a certain technology is in the marketplace.

Regarding the GConf comment, are you saying that binary databases are not used as GConf backends? that they are not possible? Sure XML is used now, but that is only after some seriousl flamewars a few years ago.

Phew, almost there.... Now, with respect to OpenOffice.org saving in MS format, that is just wrong in so many ways, it is an essay on its own (which I am, in fact, writing, and will be presenting as a discussion paper in a conference sometime soon). However, As MS has so successfully shown, Technology can NEVER replace education. when is the last time *you* researched document and information flow within the enterprise? I have, just recently, and found that roughly 65% of the information flow in a typical enterprise is internal, and the

Re:"Popular" ?

[the_rev_matt]

Most linux users I know have at least checked it out, and the Gnomers tend to really like it. I loved it (even got the boxed copy) until Red Hat 8 came out and Ximian didn't support it. Now that they support my distro again, I'll be trying it out again.

Re:"Popular" ?

[passthecrackpipe]

"about 8" means 7 firm pilots (i.e. bought and paid for by a customer as pilots) and one was really a pilot, but not officially so. I am not saying that Red Carpet or GNOME don't work, I am questioning "fitness for purpose". Virtual Folders are neither new nor unique, and extensive search capabillities are available to me all over the place.

I am neither spreading FUD, nor do I use Outlook (I use Horde ) And please point out the difference between FUD and opinions that are not the same as yours. And yes, I have used the g-conf editor. I have even architected an application around GConf. (involving CVS, RSYNC, LDAP and a lot of other stuff).

Based on your website, I would never let you near any of my datacenters.

Re:"Popular" ?

[passthecrackpipe]

Thanks for your reply. Had you considered IMAP/LDAP/DAV/SMTP? I find that works nicely, even with MSX, and even cross-platform, and pretty much surfs around any backend integration issues. Calendaring is not nice and broken, on just about any platform, but DAV as a transport has worked well for me in the past.

As you gather, I do not agree with saving in MS format - the argument of "mixed environment" c"easy compatibility" etc,, only work if you accept them without challenge. In this case, the con's *seriously* outweigh the pro's. There many different solutions to document compatibility. Saving in a broken format is the worst of them all, especially when you take into into account the relatively high failure rate of OOo saving in Ms format - it will just lead to a terrible ser experience. What do prefer: hassle when saving a file, or corrupted files? the hassle when saving a file can be sorted out with competent technology, especially when you have the specifications to the file format at your disposal.

Re:"Popular" ?

[passthecrackpipe]

Sorry, but "trolling" and "not sharing the same point of view are different things". As to you question why I can post at +2, well, that is adequately answered in the Slashdot FAQ. It means I have lots of Karma. Which in turn means I am known not to troll, and sometimes even say something sensible.

"someone, please shut him up" O shit, sorry, forgot, can only agree with the majority view, right. what a twat you are. Intelligent discourse is what broadens your horizons, not conformance to some random norm.

Re:"Popular" ?

[The Bungi]

Well, to be fair, Japanese support under the English version of Outlook ain't so hot either (see what happens when you receive an ISO-8859-1 message and use Japanese in your reply...).

That's not an Outlook feature (or lack thereof). It's supported at the OS level, at least in W2K and XP. Did you install the Japanese IME?

Re:"Popular" ?

[golgotha007]

Horde looks interesting, although the demo site is down.
opinion becomes FUD when it conveys ideas that are unfounded or untrue.

are are obviously a very angry person. perhaps your state can help pay for services which might help you, if you're low on cash.

yes, our website is 4 years old and written by our sales manager. i am not making an excuses, other than i've been too busy to make changes.

i am just happy that you've resorted to finding something inanimate to attack otherwise i would have expected some sort of wisecrack about my mother.

good day.

Re:"Popular" ?

[passthecrackpipe]

Hmm, well, whatever. In a different post, I defend my statements blow-by-blow. Please head over there to discuss them, since it is a big post, and I don't feel like re-iterating them here. I am not very angry, I just have an opinion. You may not like my opinion, and you may have a different opinion, but the fact that we do not share the same worldview does not make my statements FUD. FUD, for your information, stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, nonen of wich I attempt to sow. However, the fact that you can only conceive of me living in a "state" - i.e the US, shows the limitations of your worldview, so i'll just leave it at that.

Re:"Popular" ?

[utopyr]

What do you mean by "tree weird characters"? Don't get me wrong, I'm not making fun, I'm genuinely curious what the phrase means. One of my favorite games is to try to reverse-engineer translations that missed, thanks to the ambiguities in English.

Re:"Popular" ?

[Taos]

Just to be nice, I sat there and hit reaload on a mirror :)

Re:"Popular" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://diradmin.open-it.org/index.php

Re:"Popular" ?

[blinder]

Okay, I just couldn't pass this bit up here:


Moreover, you don't support your assertion that CORBA is alive and kicking. Why don't you search for "CORBA developer" and "J2EE developer" on any jobsite. or "CORBA Architect" and "J2EE Architect". That usually gives you an idea of how wanted a certain technology is in the marketplace.


First, full disclosure: I am a Java developer specializing in J2EE (Websphere) enterprise development.

Second, this is a "full of shit" statement. In the market that I am currently in, J2EE developers are in high demand (as high as any developer can be in this economy). I was hired just over a year ago, and got the top end of the salary spectrum, in a depressed economy, and have been working on projects with a large (fortune 1000) company exclusively in the Java enterprise space building and enhancing enterprise systems.

In fact, this company for whom I am working with now, is slowly transitioning their enterprise architecture over to J2EE because of its wide acceptance in the industry and the fact that, if left in the hands of professionals (like myself), the impossible is made possible.

Now, I find that most people who bash J2EE (and the other components that may make up a J2EE system) are usually completely ignorant of the technology and fear it because it is here to stay (my opinion only, but a well founded one as I look around and see the amount of projects in the pipeline).

Oh yeah Go here and see how there are no jobs for J2EE developers... today there were 670 posts.

Re:"Popular" ?

[damiam]

No, I'm serious. Cold start, first run after install, half a second (maybe .75). Maybe they're doing some trick and preloading it, but whatever it is, it's fast.

Re:"Popular" ?

[eyeye]

Please post why you think he is a troll,
also why did you claim in another post that he is a bigot?

So far you are the one that looks like a troll.

Re:"Popular" ?

[pcraven]

Also requires WebDAV. I bought the connector before I figured that out. Our company doesn't use WebDAV because of security concerns.

Re:"Popular" ?

[Erwos]

"However, the fact that you can only conceive of me living in a "state" - i.e the US, shows the limitations of your worldview, so i'll just leave it at that."

I'd say this shows your own ignorance. Countries are typically referred to as "states" in a serious academic environment. There is nothing US-specific about the term "state", and in fact, I'd argue the US uses it improperly (we really do have provinces these days, they're hardly the mini-countries of the late 1700s).

-Erwos

Re:"Popular" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

*WHAT* corporate Linux market. In the corporate Unix market, most people are using CDE. In the rest of the corporate market, people are using Windwos. The only other corporate Linux stories that i've seen are using KDE.

GNOME and KDE still have a long way. Ximian Desktop might be polished as hell, but GNOME still sucks donkey balls compared to WinXP.

Re:"Popular" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

> you are a troll

how so?

> and a bigot

umm?

> and your child-like behavior

*looks at your post* *rolls eyes*

> are not welcome here.

Oh wow. Kicked for slashdot.

Re:"Popular" ?

[TheLastUser]

CNET job search:

"CORBA developer" = 71 posts
"J2EE developer" = 1581 posts

Although, since J2EE != CORBA maybe this would be better:

"CORBA developer" = 71 posts
"RMI developer" = 31 posts

How about DCOM?
"DCOM developer" = 69 posts

Favorite Holy War:

"java soap" = 147
".NET soap" = 70

Can it be that more people are developing web services with Java than .NET?

".NET" = 1858
"Java" = 3361
"C++" = 2480
"Perl" = 952
"VB" = 1749
"C#" = 432

OS Holy War:

"nt administrator" = 387
"windows administrator" = 477
"linux administrator" = 157
"solaris administrator" = 359
"unix administrator" = 662
"mac administrator" = 6

Hurray! unix is used more than windows, I knew it! Maybe Macs just don't need admin's because they are so damn easy to use?

Database Holy Wars:

"Oracle" = 3808
"SQL Server" = 2033
"mysql" = 57

What's that, 57, surely an OSS db is used more than a CSS one? Surely this technique of assessing how much a product is used is not a gross misconception?

How about something we know for sure, apache vs. iis:

"apache" = 241
"iis" = 380

So according to this apache is not used quite as much as iis. uh oh....

So are these stats correct and CORBA, DCOM, and RMI are all used about the same, or is this a crazy way to guage product acceptance?

Re:"Popular" ?

[styrotech]

I think you missed his point. He seemed to be bashing CORBA not J2EE.

Or am I delusional? On second thought, don't answer that :)

Re:"Popular" ?

[TheLastUser]

Right on! I work for a .com and we use Resin-EE. The things we do with it, amaze and astound people who are developing on other platforms.

Not to say that Java is needed everywhere. There are drawbacks and bonuses to every platform, and I wouldn't want to say that perl, php, and even .net are not highly productive environments. However, in my experience Java ranks up there as one of the most powerful environments for web applications.

I share your opion that most Java detractors simply have never used it, or don't understand it. I've got no problem with someone that doesn't like Java, even if its only a gut instinct. A coder's got to like their dev env. But they shouldn't say things that aren't true, or spread FUD about it, that's not fair to people that haven't made up their minds.

I expect Java to be around for quite some time.

Re:"Popular" ?

[IamTheRealMike]

Polished, looking good, fit for purpose, easy to configure, easy to manage, sane backend architecture and infrastructure are some of the ones that most frequently come up. On the other hand, GNOME is frequently found to be more robust in the individual components (whereas KDE is found to be more robust overall.) Those are just some of the reasons. I have well over 600 pages of documentation that back up this fact. Some are public domain. Most are not, sadly.

Sure. So show us the stuff in the public domain. Those "facts" sound suspiciously like opinions to me - Ximian for instance have done usability studies, with real non-geeky people and found that KDE is more confusing because it looks like Windows, but in fact acts differently. But whatever.

Here goes a brief list. XD2, as well as GNOME, employ a philosophy that "less is more" however, that concept is, initself, seriously debatable

No it doesn't. This is widely misunderstood. It goes for a philosophy that software should be easy to use. Often that meant stripping out stupid stuff that shouldn't have been in the UI to start with. The GNOME clock has only 1 small window to configure, compared to the 6 tabs in KDE (fixed in cvs i might add). Do I care that my clock has fewer options? No. Did I ever even configure my clock when I used KDE? No. Would all the extra cruft have confused users? Yes. Even KDE is coming around to this way of thinking now, see the latest story about the clock on the dot.

You, on the other hand, do not address the issue of lock in, that most certainly exists.

You haven't shown that. You haven't even laid the groundwork for that. The most I've seen is some vague references to Connector, the sole purpose of which is to reduce lockin by allowing you to access a proprietary server solution using a free software client.

As to supporting an unix client on exchange: IMAP, SMTP, LDAP, WebDAV. etc. etc. They actually work, you know?

... but many companies don't have them deployed. For them, that product has value. You have repeatedly failed to address this point.

As long as the killscript ships with the default distro it comes with (in this case, redhat) I am working on the asumption it is required.

That's too vague. The latest version of Evolution does not require this kill script. Problem solved. Next?

CORBA is dying.

You don't have to be a kreskin to see it, the writings on the wall......

Your sleigh of hand with mentioning lesser implementations still don't make CORBA much more alive.

My point about DCOM was to show that CORBA-style architectures have been validated in the real world by years of experience. To claim it's a decrepid piece of middleware is rubbish.

Why don't you search for "CORBA developer" and "J2EE developer" on any jobsite

What a ridiculous way to measure it. You can't be a "CORBA developer" any more than you can be an IMAP developer or an HTTP developer. They are protocols . A sibling poster already pointed out that by this logic IIS is more popular than Apache.

Regarding the GConf comment, are you saying that binary databases are not used as GConf backends?

Yes, I am. 20 seconds research could have told you this. If you can't be bothered getting something as basic as this right, why should we trust anything else you say?

that they are not possible? Sure XML is used now, but that is only after some seriousl flamewars a few years ago.

Yes, they are possible, GConf is pretty flexible. However, they aren't used by default, and AFAIK there is no code for a binary backend. What was talked about back then is irrelevant - who cares? It makes no difference to you.

On the OpenOffice thing - good for you. If you do research, write transforms etc etc then you can easily change the default format. Most corporates are not going to switch their entire operation to OO in one go. They need interop

Re:"Popular" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Super-pedent here -- MAPI is implemented right over DCE RPC -- no DCOM.

Re:"Popular" ?

[BJH]

You didn't try it, did you? What I meant by that comment was not that I couldn't enter Japanese (not a problem), but rather that Outlook screws up such a mail by insisting that the encoding is ISO-8859-1 rather than JIS, which tends to confuse most mail clients when they receive such a message.

Progress

[js995]

With all that has been said on the issue of GUI's on Linux, its great to see consistently improved releases across the board. Ximian 2 looks great, and the closely tied integration of OpenOffice is the kind of thing that will probably be appealing to those looking to roll Linux out to corporate desktops. Seems to be the 1.0 branch though, which is a shame since there are a lot of useful enhancements in the 1.1 series.

For those looking to install it quickly...

[Anonymous Coward]

Posted anonymously on purpose.

PLEASE USE MIRRORS!!!

1. Open a terminal window.
2. Using the su command, become superuser (root).
3. Type the following command or cut and paste it into your terminal:
wget -q -O - http://go.ximian.com |sh

YALGUI

[BiOFH]

Meanwhile Linux watchers everywhere are waiting for the inevitable splinter group to drop off and start its own 'better' version now that a second release has rolled out. Said one caffeine-addled nerd, "We're just too close to some sort of agreement on what works well within the user community. Can't have that."

Easy to remove?

[macemoneta]

Is it easy to de-install and return to a pristine (current distribution level) state yet? The last time I tried this, which is required when performing a distribution update with Redhat, it required a couple of hours dependency resolution. As a result, I never re-installed after the distribution upgrade. Redhat now includes Evolution, and the new "--aid" option on rpm makes automatically pulling in dependencies much easier (I don't need Red-Carpet).

Re:Easy to remove?

[luge]

It's never going to be easy to just remove 200+ packages, so no, you can't just return to a pristine distro. [And anyone who thinks we should is welcome to show us how and demonstrate with an installation of similar complexity. :) But we have gone to a great deal of effort to match our versions, epochs, and package names with those of the distro so that distro upgrades to the next revision of the distro should go more smoothly than it did with XG1.4.

Re:Easy to remove?

[IamTheRealMike]

It's a one way trip?

How about if you use the packaging tools to uninstall GNOME2 entirely, then reinstall from the CDs. Would that fix it?

Re:Easy to remove?

[passthecrackpipe]

A question I have had for a *very* long time. Why ship all those packages? Why essentially make a distro-in-a-distro? I appreciate that some of the stuff you would need would require some patching, but why not do what everyone else does, and submit upstream? You are, at the end of the day, not only forking Linux to an extent, but also invalidating any hope of support the unsuspecting victim may have from his original distro. when I orginally got XD1, I noticed Ximian was installing 200+ packages that *were already on my machine*. Not a good sign. More like a sign of hopeless architecture, to me. Not to knock Ximian too hard (I do that in another post ;-) ) , but I would really like to understand the technical reasoning behind that particular design decision.

Oh, and "can't be bothered / can't convince the upstream amaintainers to accept my patches" is not an answer. So far, all I can see is that Ximian is trying to get the same lock-in on my desktop that Microsoft has....

Re:Easy to remove?

[TheRaven64]

And anyone who thinks we should is welcome to show us how and demonstrate with an installation of similar complexity

Okay, I'll give it a go. You type:

pkg_deinstall -R gnome2

on your FreeBSD box (with the portupgrade port / package installed). This will uninstall the gnome2 meta-port (which is a port containing nothing, just dependencies on all of the parts of gnome2, allowing all of gnome2 to be installed by installing this port and all dependencies recursively). It will also recurse upwards through the dependency tree and remove all packages that gnome2 depends on, and all that they depend on etc unless another package / port depends on them. If you then decide you want to install kde 3.whatever (is 3.3 current now? I've lost track) then all you need to do is type:

portinstall kde3

and it will install kde3. If you want to make sure that you are always using the latest stable version of gnome2 then you can just create a simple cron job which will run every day, cvsup your ports tree and run portupgrade on gnome2. Two lines of shell script to make sure that your gnome2 installation is always current.

Re:Easy to remove?

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't take the distro vs. vendor conflicts into account, and it doesn't work cross-platform, and I doubt it provides a verifiably correct package database state. And it doesn't do anything to downgrade or to replace removed packages with something else.

Re:Easy to remove?

[stefanlasiewski]

200 packages is a very difficult thing to maintain. You have up to 200 different versions, and only very few are guarenteed to be completely compatable with the other packages. Otherwise, you're just aiming for a moving target (Developers of GTK1.2 and Gnome2 complained about the specs and packages changing frequently).

The best way to maintain a stable release of a project that uses all 200 packages is to maintain your own version of all these packages: freeze their version number (feature freeze), and have your release & QA team verify each package (which is what the *ximian.rpm means).

As a consumer, I'm happy that Ximian does this. It means I don't have to decend into depencency hell just to maintain a stable desktop environment.

On the downside, it means I don't get all the latest and greatest features with all of the Ximian packages. For certain products, like Gaim and Mozilla, I use my own packages because I'm willing to maintain my own packages, and don't want to wait for Ximian's release team.

Re:Easy to remove?

[passthecrackpipe]

Ah, I see. you mean, like the Debian team do, but then different.....

Seriously, I know what you are trying to say, but isn't that what all distro's do? and if Ximian is doing the same, does that make Ximian a distro? Isn't that the *definition* of a distro?

The way I see see it, Ximian is just a distro that doesn't implement the base layer, but just layers on top of my exisiting distro. That would be fine, were it not for the fact that that breaks whatever distro it sits on. consumers would now be asking: Who's security patches do I apply? Who is going to support, oh, say, the XML subsystem of my box? I paid £60 for my copy of SuSE 8.2, and more for support. If I install Ximian, what is SuSE going to say if I have an issue with that XML subsystem (I know: they will tell me to send a mail to miguel de Icaza, and ask him WTF happend to my perfectly good and stable distro.)

This is what I was aiming at when I was talking about supplying patches to upstream etc. The best way to maintain a stable 200 packages *from Ximians perspective* is to roll your own, and give those to your customers. The best way from the end users perspective is to use something that doesn't screw up your exisiting distro.

Re:Easy to remove?

[Balinares]

I'd say (at the risk of losing karma for the sake of honesty, which is still a fair bargain as far as I'm concerned), shortsightedness.

Initially, Gnome, and then Ximian, seem to have been designed with software reuse in mind -- use existing libs, don't rewrite your own, etc. This is NOT a bad thing. Only... Software changes, grows, evolves. In an ideal world, all this would have more or less remained compatible through versions. But this is not an ideal world, and not all the libs grew in ways compatible with Ximian, as far as I can tell. And Ximian now seems to need to replace those libs with its own versions of them. That's the gist of it the way I perceive it, but YMMV, etc.

The KDE decision to cram everything they need under kdelibs was initially a huge concession to bloat, and is still often criticized as such. It does, however, make installation and maintainance considerably simpler. In the long run, it might have been a better choice for the purposes of the project -- at a cost in the short run. For long Gnome was much better than KDE, there's no arguing that. The whole short term vs. long term thing, that applies SO well to so many things.

So you basically have to pick between either initial bloat, or requiring upgrade/replacement of countless third-party libs for each new release. Software design is a bitch, isn't it? :)

Maybe Ximian should just package its dependencies together, so that it would install them where it needs them without fscking up the rest of the system. For now, I'm not gonna install a desktop environment that will potentially prevent other environments from working, sorry.

I'll still give XD2 a try one of these days -- my experience of the Ximian dependency hell dates back from XD1, maybe they modernized its design significantly since then. We'll see if it behaves cleanly, or threatens to screw up my currently installed libs -- in which case, bye bye Ximian. Till XD3 anyway.

Re:Easy to remove?

[passthecrackpipe]

One of the reasons I ran like hell from XD1 was the dependency hell. Maybe XD2 has fixed that. As you say, Maybe XD3 will.

Just trying to get my brain around your .sig gives me a headache.

Re:Easy to remove?

[fault0]

Moreover, I ran from GNOME 1.x *in general* because of depedency hell. I hope that GNOME 2.x has fixed this.

KDE is much, much, much, easier to install by comparison, in my opinion.

Re:Easy to remove?

[stefanlasiewski]

Seriously, I know what you are trying to say, but isn't that what all distro's do? and if Ximian is doing the same, does that make Ximian a distro? Isn't that the *definition* of a distro?

It's a 'Gnome Distro', in the same way that you have 'Sun Gnome', RedHat Gnome or the vanilla Gnome available from gnome.org.

"Linux distro" is a vague term. In my mind, a distro includes the Kernel, tools that support the kernel, libraries to support the kernel, and basic level tools to manipulate the OS (ls, cp, odprobe). Ximian includes none of these.

The best way to maintain a stable 200 packages *from Ximians perspective* is to roll your own, and give those to your customers.

Well, we're talking about Ximian the business, so of course it's the best thing from Ximian's perspective. However, it is also beneficial for home users and administrators of a Linux office environment.

Ximian's target consumer is mostly large offices who are looking to run a centrally managed Linux desktop. From an administrators perspective, it makes sense to let Ximian manage the packages.

The best way from the end users perspective is to use something that doesn't screw up your exisiting distro.

RedHat's Gnome and Woody's Gnome are already partially screwed up, in my eyes. Even with the current Redhat Gnome or Gnome on Debian Woody, I still get stuck in dependancy hell.

Personally, I like offloading some of the work to Ximian even for my home system. It makes less work for me.

Re:Easy to remove?

[Rysc]

It's never going to be easy to just remove 200+ packages, so no, you can't just return to a pristine distro.

Oh yeah?

apt-get remove xlibs
[snip]
43 packages upgraded, 10 newly installed, 1375 to remove and 764 not upgraded.
[snip]

I suspect (based on previous experience with similar operations) if I said "yes" here, they wold all be removed... easily.

Not that I would, but apt-get remove kdelibs4 is only 143 packages (this one I've done before, without problems, and then later re-added) and I wanted at least 200 without typing in a bunch of names.

Owned

[gylle]

Now there is good advise: Be brave, pipe the contents from an url posted on slashdot by Anonymous Coward directly to /bin/sh!

Are you kidding?!

Re:Owned

[42forty-two42]

It grabs the page at go.ximian.com, which is a shellscript, and runs it. Since it's at ximian.com, you might as well trust it.

Re:Owned

[GC]

NO.

There are many DNS servers out there who are vulnerable to DNS poisoning and the go.ximian.com A record is a holy grail for that.

Please ensure that you are getting the real go.ximian.com, by checking the record with dig.

Like so:

dig @gustavo.ximian.com go.ximian.com

Anyone who doesn't do this deserves to get rooted.

Re:Owned

[Quixote]

Are you kidding?!

Why do you think s/he posted anonymously?

Re:Owned

[IamTheRealMike]

And this is less safe than just downloading it yourself, saving it and running it .... why?

Sure. If you're going to read every line of the script and check for trojans, then maybe. But 99% of people don't do that, can't do that and never will. So really it's just more convenient this way. Feel free to wear the tinfoil hat if you like.

Anyone who doesn't do this deserves to get rooted.

What a ridiculous idea. As if everybody is going to audit the installer in its entirety (you run the ELF binary as root remember) before running it .

Re:Owned

[Kopretinka]

So the quick installation guide was posted anonymously on purpose by you in order for you to add this comment and have *two* high-score posts, right? 8-)

Re:Owned

[CausticWindow]

There is this thing called checksums. You might have heard of it.

I agree with the parent. If you're running a shell script, as root, straight from a web server, you migh as well run Windows.

Re:Owned

[sforman]

And how do you check gustavo.ximian.com points where it should? ;)

Re:Owned

[Nick of NSTime]

You taught me something valuable today. Thanks.

Re:Owned

[GC]

Good point... this check only makes a potential hacker need to go one step further.

MD5 checksums are verifyable against a trusted source for example against a known public key.

However, you could try the root servers, they are actively maintained and most people would know if they were giving out bogus information.

dig @a.gtld-servers.net ximian.com

Re:Owned

[42forty-two42]

How do you know if the root servers' entries were poisoned? *That* would be the holy grail.

Re:Owned

[IamTheRealMike]

And if you can poison go.ximian.com, why not www.ximian.com?

Re:Owned

[HiThere]

This is one of the things that has long bothered me about the Ximian install procedure. OTOH, I'm not sure why I feel that the Debian apt-get is any safer. Or the Red Hat up2date (well---OK, they sign those with a key that's checked against a key you have stored .. most of them, anyway. But not the contribs.).

Re:Owned

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are you getting the checksums from?

Re:Owned

[GC]

well, then you just shouldn't do DNS, and if anyone brings up spoofed IPs then go and use an OS that uses random sequence numbers for TCP.

import/export

[drfireman]

I've found evolution to be more than a little on the heavy side, but otherwise I don't mind its borrowed look and feel. The virtual folder feature is handy for organizing email sometimes, although I personally wouldn't mind keeping multiple copies of messages to accomplish the same thing.

One issue that dogs me constantly with email clients, though, is limited import/export. I have old email in lots of different formats. I can generally get messages back into something like sendmail format, 1 message per file, but that's about as close as I've seen to a common format for email import/export. And a lot of clients make even this difficult. Is the latest evolution any good at importing and/or exporting a directory of thousands of messages? Are there other clients that will do better?

Re:import/export

[Anonymous Coward]

Evolution supports standard mbox format.
Once you have your old mail folders as mbox
there is no problem. Coincidently I have just
finished importing my old Eudora mail into
Evo using the eudora2unix.pl preformatter.

ttfn
AC.

Re:import/export

[drfireman]

The problem with mbox format is that many email clients don't produce it. Some email clients will produce files of concatenated sendmail-format messages, which evolution can import if you go through and manually modify spurious From lines. It would be much cleaner to just import the individual messages as-is.

Re:import/export

[JerkBoB]

Perl is your friend.

If you're lucky, there are already modules written to handle the formats you're importing from and exporting to. If you're not, you'll just have to spend a little more time on it.

Re:import/export

[Anonymous Coward]

concatenated sendmail-format messages *is* mbox. unless you are talking about the broken Sun format that is also called mbox but not really mbox at all...

Oh Slashdot, Slashdot, Slashdot....

[tolan-b]

Bastards! My download was running sweet at about 100KB/s when this story went up... Now it's on about 8KB/s :/

Torrent link?

[42forty-two42]

Anyone have a bittorrent for this one?

popular?

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't a troll but a serious question...is Gnome/Evolution truly popular? Does anyone use it?

I've tried it out every time I install a new linux distro, and i've always found it to be terrible. Particularly the user interfaces, dependencies (i cant install a new version of mozilla because it'll break evolution??), and speed.

Re:popular?

[mgkimsal2]

Whoah - what distros are you using? I've seen people here use various redhat, mandrakes and suses over the past couple years with various versions of Mozilla and Evolution. No one has ever seen dependancies between those two - I can upgrade or delete Mozilla multiple times without ever affecting evolution. ???

Re:popular?

[Stephen Chadfield]

All my family use Gnome and Evolution at home (though to be honest I often find myself using Fastmail's web interface for email) on Redhat 9. After using it for some months now I can't think of anything about it that annoys me off the top of my head. In fact, I find it a pleasure to use.

The Mozilla supplied with RH9 is good enough for my purposes so I no longer feel the need to track every point release.

Re:popular?

[Pointy_Hair]

I don't know what the original author was doing but I did have trouble like that. An install with the RH 8.0 ISOs put Mozilla (v0.9 if I recall) in a different default directory than the rpm downloaded from Mozilla for upgrade to the current version. The Gnome shortcuts (installed with RH) would launch the original version of Moz instead of the fresh upgrade. All my preferences and shortcuts were only loading with the old version. And Evolution would use the old version as well. I don't think there is a hard link between Evo and Moz, but if both are present something is there. At the time I did that install, my Linux skills were still rusty or absent (over two years since my last try) and it took me an hour or so to figure it out.

In hindsight, although it was a pain in the ass, it created a valuable and often used learning opportunity - querying an rpm package to figure out where everything went. To RH old timers that's a pretty simple trick but to a newbie quite a challenge. So between fixing shortcuts and creating a few links it wasn't terribly complex to fix. Just one more hassle that leads the non-geek masses to opt for non-free stuff that works pretty well out of the box.

Re:popular?

[MrZeebo]

I've been using Linux for quite some time now, and I actually ran into that Mozilla / Evolution dependency problem as well (on Red Hat 8). It seemed unbelievable to me at first, as well... installing a newer version of Mozilla had somehow broken Evolution. I never did figure out exactly what the link was, because I use Mozilla Mail rather than Evolution anyways.

Just an experienced warning to people who use both Mozilla and Evolution -- be careful! ;-)

Re:popular?

[Anonymous Coward]

Evolution does in fact use some of mozilla libraries. I believe you need the mozilla-nspr package.

I've fixed problems before by adding /usr/lib/mozilla-1.xx to /etc/ld.so.conf and running ldconfig

Re:popular?

[chetohevia]

That's been fixed. It was related to using Mozilla's SSL libraries.

Re:popular?

[fault0]

Yes, GNOME and Evolution are pretty popular. Evolution is probably the most used email client for Linux.

By all estimates, KDE is quite a bit more popular than GNOME, but it's not terribly easy to accuratly judge this I'm sure.

(BTW, I've been using KDE full time since GNOME 2.0 came out.. used GNOME 1.2 full time, mixed GNOME 1.4 and KDE 2.2, and used KDE 1.2 full time)

Look and learn folks!

[Anonymous Coward]

The installer must be one of the sexiest installers around... beats even windows installer.. still downloading so I cant speak for the rest of the product but it looks promising... anyway... why whas that kde and gnome didn't merge again? I mean it's great to have choice but... lets have something thats capable to compete with the evil empire first.. then compete with eachothers! Doh!

download on windows

[HoneyBunchesOfGoats]

Is there any way to download the complete package from my windows box (which is fast) so I can install it on my linux box (which is slow) later?

Not usable with RedHat 7.3?

[Patrick May]

I've tried several mirrors and gotten the same problem during dependency resolution:

The installer was unable to download information about a required channel for this install (Red Hat Linux 7.3 (161)).
This error may be the result of a network failure. Please verify that your network connection is active and that your network settings are correct.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Patrick

Re:Not usable with RedHat 7.3?

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here. It appears that for the Redhat 7.3 package info it is always pulling from ximian.com regardless of the mirror you selected. I guess they figured the Redhat 7.3 info wasn't going to be demanded enough to disperse to the mirrors?

Bummer :/

Re:Not usable with RedHat 7.3?

[florin]

I've no idea about the RH 7.3 but I like your sig.. cool to see a fellow Ancient Anguish player here

Re:Not usable with RedHat 7.3?

[EMR]

It was like this last night at midnight EST.. when I started trying to install it... 12 hours later it Still refuses to download the RedHat 7.3 channel data.. I have put a bug report in their bugzilla as it's they don't have mirrors for any of the "OS specific update" channels apparently.. (really unwise IMHO).

Debian is *not* being dropped

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian is *not* being dropped. It's simply not supported *yet*.

Ximian makes most it's money off of RedHat and SuSE so it's obvious they'll want to support those first. Once they get money from these distributions, they'll support other distributions. They used the same approach with the 1.x distribution. Read the "download page" if you want confirmation of this.

slow

[Fizban64]

Well it's been slashdotted very badly, we really should use mirrors more often.

Mandrake 9.1 support?

[crivens]

I presume they don't have support for Mandrake 9.1 yet?

Re:Mandrake 9.1 support?

[kitzilla]

No, they aren't ready to support Mandrake 9.1 yet. Not with the full desktop, anyway. There *is* a version of Red Carpet and Evolution 1.4 for Mandrake. Both work well on my desktop: have fun.

I'm pretty sure we'll see a Mandrake and Yellow Dog Linux desktop release soon.

Mandrake support dropped?

[boer]

I see Mandrake has been dropped and only SuSe and RH distributions are supported. Does this mean that Mandrake is already user friendly enough and doesn't need any pasted-on-top solutions?

Re:Mandrake support dropped?

[gik]

Yes, you dolt.
that's exactly what it means. :|

Re:Mandrake support dropped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey look it's someone with no concept of subtlety. Goodness, I hate the community sometimes.

Yes, Debian is being dropped

[reynaert]

See This mail on the debian gtk/gnome mailing lists.

On Tue, 2003-06-03 at 14:55, Mark Gordon <mtgordon@ximian.com> wrote:
> There are no plans for an XD2 release for Woody.
>
> -Mark Gordon

Some people are starting to work on an unofficial woody port. Unstable already contains gnome 2.2 and most interesting ximian patches will probably be applied.

Looking for a Live CD...

[dcuny]

I run Mandrake, and have downloaded Ximian in the past. However, I always seem to end up in some sort of dependency hell that Red Carpet is unable to resolve.

Don't get me wrong - Red Carpet has gotten better by leaps and bounds, and when it works, it's wonderful.

Automated software can only go so far in resolving the mess of dependancies, and I finally understand why it wants to uninstall half my machine before I can download some package. But it still makes me a bit leery to go down the Ximian path without some serious functionality (or eye candy) to tempt me.

Since Mandrake 9.1 isn't supported yet (later this week, maybe), that's a bit premature anyway...

Given that (for reasons already discussed in great length) rolling back from a Ximian install is problematic, it would be nice if there were a Live CD (similar to Knoppix) to preview Ximian with.

Unfortunately, Knoppix dropped Gnome because it was just too difficult to get it working. The Morphix folk have a HeavyGUI with Gnome 2.2, so perhaps they will soon have a Ximian desktop release as well.

Has Ximian considered releasing a Live CD?

A little note.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please do all of us a favor and don't join the #gnome channel on GimpNET. We are not there to answer everyones problems regarding Ximian Desktop 2. We do use GNOME but that doesn't make us the answerwizards to your problems. If you have problems which is Ximian Desktop 2 related then please contact Ximiand support.

changelog?

[Zeut]

Anyone know what is new and improved witht this release? Other than being told 500 times that it has better exchange support anyone know what else changed?

Ximian is Lindows+warehouse for everybody

[Anonymous Coward]

XD2 tries to use the default packages of the distribution by default so you won't have the "download too many packages" problem. For the most part, Ximian has tried to make sure that most of it's desired changes are already part of GNOME 2, so it doesn't need to make many changes.

Ximian's ultimate goal is to do what Lindows has done with their software warehouse -- make is possible for vendors to offer "one click download/purchase" of their products. The key difference with Lindows is:

* it's distribution independent. RedHat, Mandrake, and SuSE all customize GNOME and KDE differently and provide different apps. Ximian's GNOME provides a common library and GUI between distributions

* most software on RedCarpet is free -- you don't even need to pay a "signup charge".

* Ximian is based on GNOME 2 while Lindows is based on KDE.

Evolution 1.3.92 is in Debian unstable

[dunham]

It was a seperate package in "experimental" but it's now been moved to "sid". I expect Takuo will upload 1.4 soon.

FreeBSD ?

[Billly Gates]

Has anyone got the source to compile on FreeBSD? My lousy ISP is implementing bandwith caps and I want to make sure it will work before I use half of my monthly usage to download this.

Red Hat Linux 7.1 & 7.2?

[antdude]

Will there be RPM packages for these or are they outdated?

Re:Red Hat Linux 7.1 & 7.2?

[Anonymous Coward]

Outdated, but you can upgrade your system to Redhat 7.3 using apt4rpm and the freshrpms apt sources.

Just go to www.freshrpms.net and check it out.

I did an apt-get dist upgrade from 7.2 to 7.3 with very little trouble

Whatevah

[autechre]

I've found that most people these days are used to a Webmail-ish interface, as they have their personal email account with Hotmail or Yahoo!. Something like Squirrelmail or IMP is very easy for them to use; I don't have to tell them anything.

Also, as others have pointed out in the past, Microsoft changes the way that Windows, Office, etc. work with each revision, so you have to retrain anyway. Plus, not everyone would be migrating from Windows.

BUY A COPY!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Support Ximian by buying a copy (and stop complaining). XD2 looks amazing and I just put my money where my mouth is. Sometimes I feel like the free software community (or the slashdot community at least) are a bunch of crabs in a barrel. And no, I don't work for Ximian!

Distribution purge?

[Lord Kestrel]

From their website:

Ximian Desktop 2 will be available on June 9th. It will support Red Hat 7.3, 8.0 and 9 and SuSE 8.2. Please see our web site http://www.ximian.com/products/desktop for more information.

Other distributions are not supported at this time.
---

They used to support a dozen different distributions of Linux, along with Solaris 8, which was quite nice. I was hoping they would update it to Solaris 9, but it appears they have trimmed the list quite a bit. Does anyone know why they axed the supported list down to almost nothing?

Re:Distribution purge?

[Chilltowner]

I've read in other places on their site (damn, can't find the links) that more distros are coming. As a poster above wrote, most of Ximian's biz is on Red Hat and SuSE, so they're rolling out first. I'm hoping they'll still have Yellow Dog support, since my wife's computer runs off that.

Mishaps in the installer and/or bad mirrors?

[boer]

Even though one uses a particular mirror to download files, the installer still loads some important files from Ximian's servers. Which, you can guess, are pretty slow right about now.

What's interesting is that while some those files are common, like glibc RPM, they are not available in RPM directories on mirror sites which contain dozens of other needed packages. So it looks like the installer falls back to Ximian's server by default. Also this happens to with files that are on the selected mirror as well.

MIRRORS!

[Rastor]

Here's some more mirrors I found:

http://ximian.dulug.duke.edu/pub/ximian/
http://ftp.dc.aleron.net/ximian/
http://ximian.oregonstate.edu/
http://open-systems.ufl.edu/mirrors/rsync.ximian.c om/
http://0-open-systems.ufl.edu.library.csuhayward.e du/mirrors/rsync.ximian.com/

Re:MIRRORS!

[Anonymous Coward]

mirror? what is a mirror for those guys? the installler is always looking for packages in their redcarpet server..., and it don't let you go back in some common errors, like when you don't have enough free space and when there are dependency problems.
I just want to evaluate the product before purchase, but it seems I'm gonna leave the try.

1.4 Connector Question

[edoug]

Does anyone know if the connector has any off-line support yet? My pet annoyance of 1.2 was since it used webdav if you weren't connected, you had zero access to data...even previoulsy read messages.

XD2 a winner so far

[Phantasm66]

It was a struggle getting the rpms from the mirror servers today, but what do you expect its just released today. My workstation in the office was a struggle but I did manage to get XD2 fairly easily from my home machine. First impressions are that its very slick and clean, looks very good and feels very good. I will have to give it a go in place of KDE for a while, at least for my Red Hat Installation. Downloading was the only problem, no dependancy problems or anything, the installer seems to pull in everything that it needed. Its a pain though having to rename all of the "E-Mail" menu icons back to "Ximian Evolution" etc, but hey for a normal user it might be nice. Linux could take off on the desktop I think with combinations like Red Hat 9 and XD2 on the go together. If only they could unite their efforts a lot more, maybe we would have a desktop that non-geek mortals are ready to use.

Mono?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Mono/C# used in any of Ximian's commercial products?

Re:Mono?

[fault0]

No not yet.

Re:Mono?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't that the point of creating Mono in the first place - to use it in their products?

Re:Mono?

[stefanlasiewski]

Yes, and the next major versions might be using alot of C# code.

wow this is nothing more than a port to gtk 2 :(

[Hohlraum]

I was really pumped cuz i thought it would have new features. The email client functionality is still miles behind something as basic as Outlook Express. It is way faster though I'll give them that.

Dependency Resolution

[Dimwit]

Well, I was all excited about this, and now I discover that it doesn't seem to want to work. *sigh* Anyone else getting

"The installer was unable to find a required package for this install (xsane, 271)"? I get this even off of ftp.ximian.org, and several of the mirrors.

everything looks much more polished

[bobaferret]

The only problem I see, is that metacity still doesn't understand xinerama, and has the most screwed up focusing problems. Where when one windo gets focus it jumps to the front, even when the settings say otherwise.

Re:everything looks much more polished

[steveg]

Don't know about xinerama, but you're certainly right about screwed up focus settings. Metacity is pretty much unusable for me.

I've got plain Gnome 2.2 (for the moment) and I've replaced metacity with another WM. Unfortunatley, all the Gnome stuff seems 'integrated' enough that all kinds of things seem to break if you use something other than what they designed in. I'm afraid XD2 would probably be even less flexible.

I'd be willing to put up with Metacity's other warts if it had a rational focus policy (or could be configured to have one.) I'm going to keep on hammering on Gnome a bit longer and if I can't find a configuration that works right I'll give up and switch to KDE.

I don't like KDE, but it gets focus right. That excuses a multitude of sins, even ugliness.

Re:everything looks much more polished

[bobaferret]

I've found that the way to deal with the focus issue is to click and hold on the desired task in the task manager which will cause the window to popup, and while still holding the mouse button down go oever to the desired window.

I was hoping that XD2 would have an upgrade to Metacity. Nope same crap. But I wouldn't call it any less flexible. After a days worth of use, id say it'
s worth the 300MB download. Galeon sux though. yeah it's light weight, but they haven't kept up with mozilla development. No more groups and stuff.

Re:everything looks much more polished

[steveg]

My problem with the focus is that I don't *want* it to pop up. Especially not if I click on it. It's got to stay on the layer it started on unless I tell it to raise (by, e.g. clicking on border or title bar).

Right now with metacity, that's not possible. If you click on it, it raises. No exceptions.

Re:everything looks much more polished

[bobaferret]

I agree, that has driven me nuts. I've devloped methods of work, that depend on things like that, and gnome 2.2 killed my productivty. I never really understood the arguments for switiching from sawfish, it seemed to work really well. I would have atleast waited till all of the functionality was the re before switiching.

Re:wow this is nothing more than a port to gtk 2 :

[Anonymous Coward]

The email client functionality is still miles behind something as basic as Outlook

Then go use Windows and quit complaining.

On my box, Evolution is just as fast as OE...

Xiaman 2 Screenshot

[Anonymous Coward]

http://benz.mine.nu/screenshots/fibs/06.09.03XIMIA N2.jpg

I was able to score Ximian 2 last night the second it came out. Heres a screenshot.

xiaman screenshot

[Anonymous Coward]

http://benz.mine.nu/screenshots/fibs/06.09.03XIMIA N2.jpg

Win32

[BoneMarrow]

Anyone know where they are hiding the windows version?

If anyone has a copy could they please email it to me. Thanks.

Re:Win32

[Zeut]

Actually, I would really like to see a windows version of Evolution. It would help in migrating people to Linux / FreeBSD, just as OpenOffice does.

Re:Win32

[stefanlasiewski]

I'd love to have Evolution on Windows.

I really want an email client that can work well on a dual-boot Windows/Linux machine, using the same set of files for email.

At home, I keep my email on a FAT32 partition, and read the email with Mozilla Mail on both Windows and Linux. It works, but Mozilla Mail is really slow and lacking in some features.

I'm considering setting up a second box to serve as an IMAP server, but I'm lacking time and money.

No luck with install

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone actually gotten it to install completely on a RH9 box?

Re:No luck with install

[jtrostel]

Installed fine on a RH 9.0 box here. Took quite a while to download ;) .. but after that there were no real issues... except that blasted top menu.. I want it on the bottom. (I'm sure that'll get fixed 'real soon'.

Now to see if I can get another copy installed here at home.

Re:No luck with install

[viware]

Installed fine on my RH9. As someone else said, it took a while to download, but other than that it went pretty smooth (actually the download quit twice because of 'network' troubles...). God stuff! I like it!

Re:wow this is nothing more than a port to gtk 2 :

[Anonymous Coward]

1.4 was just a port to gtk2: So basically it is somewhat functionally equivalent to 1.2

Will probably have a 2.0 version which should have its own tricks.

And when you show me how to do virtual folders in outlook express, then I may begin to consider the possibility of thinking that OE is better than evolution.

You obviously have not used evolution (much)

Re:No luck with install [in RH 8.0]

[Motie]

Ximian installer freezes about halfway through. I'm trying now via Red Carpet [upgraded via RPM from 1.x to 2.x]. Wish me luck.

Re:wow this is nothing more than a port to gtk 2 :

[Motie]

For example(s)?