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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."
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.
download now. Troll later.
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.
.: Max Romantschuk
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.
----
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.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
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...)
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
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.
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
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.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
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).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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."
- I am made of meat.
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:
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:
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.
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).
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
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?!
Bastards! My download was running sweet at about 100KB/s when this story went up... Now it's on about 8KB/s :/
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. :)
IAAL,BIANLY
Anyone have a bittorrent for this one?
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.
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. ???
creation science book
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
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.
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.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
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.
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?
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
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.
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
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
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!
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
Here's some more mirrors I found:
c om/ e du/mirrors/rsync.ximian.com/
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.
http://0-open-systems.ufl.edu.library.csuhayward.
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.
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?
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
Anyone know where they are hiding the windows version?
If anyone has a copy could they please email it to me. Thanks.
Unfortunately, no one can be told what my sig is...