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

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

[__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.

"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" ?

[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" ?

[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" ?

[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: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: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

[sforman]

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

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:Debian?

[the_2nd_coming]

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

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!

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?

[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.

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.