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Ximian Desktop 2, Evolution Released

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the join-the-masses-grabbing-the-files dept.

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."

33 of 237 comments (clear)

  1. No time to post.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    download now. Troll later.

  2. Re:Nuh uh by altp · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Good to see by barcodez · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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. Re:Good to see by __past__ · · Score: 3, Insightful
      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.

      --
      Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
  4. Yes, but by jkrise · · Score: 5, Funny

    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....
    1. Re:Yes, but by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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 ;)

    2. Re:Yes, but by cjjjer · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  5. Source by riggwelter · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...
    1. Re:Source by luge · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --

      IAAL,BIANLY

  6. Progress by js995 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:Debian? by opk · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  8. For those looking to install it quickly... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  9. Re:"Popular" ? by Ami+Ganguli · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  10. Re:"Popular" ? by afidel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  11. YALGUI by BiOFH · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  12. Easy to remove? by macemoneta · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Easy to remove? by luge · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --

      IAAL,BIANLY

    2. Re:Easy to remove? by passthecrackpipe · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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....

      --
      People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
  13. Owned by gylle · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?!

    1. Re:Owned by GC · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

  14. Oh Slashdot, Slashdot, Slashdot.... by tolan-b · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  15. Re:"Popular" ? by luge · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

  16. Torrent link? by 42forty-two42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Anyone have a bittorrent for this one?

  17. Re:Debian? by samj · · Score: 3, Informative

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

  18. Re:"Popular" ? by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 3, Informative
    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.

  19. Re:"Popular" ? by afidel · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  20. Re:popular? by Stephen+Chadfield · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  21. Re:Debian? by reaper20 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  22. Debian is *not* being dropped by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  23. Re:"Popular" ? by BlackHawk-666 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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?

    --
    All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
  24. Yes, Debian is being dropped by reynaert · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  25. BUY A COPY!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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!

  26. MIRRORS! by Rastor · · Score: 3, Informative

    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/