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Aethera 1.0
gatch writes "theKompany.com released version 1.0 of their cross-platform PIM suite Aethera. KOrganizer is included as a calendar and todo list component. Check out these screenshots. According to Shawn Gordon, theKompany president, 'Actually we are about 2 weeks away from having Aethera work with Kolab [groupware server] - at least that is our sense of it at the moment.' Interesting discussion at KDE.news."
because the Open Source movement has never, EVER been about innovation.
It has always been about "Hrm, nice, but buggy and expensive. Lets copy it, and make it better..."
GNU, Linux, KDE, etc. All copies of another system. Hell, even BSD UNIX is a cloned version of ATT UNIX.
..this is looking like a viable alternative to evolution, which aside from raising the level of development for this sort of software, should be beneficial to the desktop linux market; having a viable alternative to outlook is one thing, but having a community in which more than one are being actively developed to compete or provide more choice for companies migrating to different operating systems is excellent. :)
The interface certainly doesn't look as pretty as evolution (although it's hard to tell; after 5 posts, the server is treacley already), but I'm not really into KDE interfaces. *shrug*.. it'll be interesting to see how much of a userbase it builds..
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you
...excellent, I hope it's buggy so I can migrate from Outlook easily.
*cough* SCO
SIGERR: laziness exceeds quota
Not entirely true: perl, php, etc, aren't copies of anything else that I can think of.
Trolling is a art,
That's so Kool dude. Let's Klap our hands in Komplete celebration.
"Sufferin' succotash."
That's a very naive assessment of the Open Source community. The goal of Open Source has always been to create high-quality software and distribute it for Free As In Speech. Compare this to closed-source crapware like Micro$oft Outhouse, which is driven by marketing alone. Micro$oft creates new versions of their closed-source crapware every year, expects people to pay $300 to upgrade, and forces the upgrade by breaking backward compatibility.
Open-source file formats, on the other hand, never change. I can take a LaTeX file from 1989 and create a beautiful PostScript file using Free As In Speech software. Try doing that with Micro$oft "software."
I'm not Seth Finkelstein. I still speak the truth.
I think I'm lost in the world of IT about what PIM, groupware and all that actually do, what applications they got in this world (both in professional and personal use) and how these technologies improve our current situation?
Hate me!
" because the Open Source movement has never, EVER been about innovation"
Don't be such a stupid Troll. At some point everything is built upon something which came before it. Your examples are like looking at a Porsche and saying "Yep no innovation there", its just a copy of a Model T.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
So why don't people apply the same insight to Microsoft? There's got to be a thousand people who say that "Microsoft doesn't innovate - every single one of their products was based on .
I think the parent has a point. Open Source has to be held to exactly the same standard as everybody else.
Could someone in the know explain to me the advantages this have over Kontact, the KDE PIM solution? Since it is already using KAddressbook and KOrganizer, that juts leaves ToDo and email.... KMail is already a highly capable email client, I doubt they could improve on that much?
... or perhaps the MS corporate proxy just doesn't want you to see it :)
.:diatonic:.
Doesn't look like it integrates with Palm OS devices, as Evolution does (and some other KDE PIM apps).
It all goes back to the old saying that if someone has physical access to yuor machine, you're already fucked.
... shame I'm not one of them. It's nice to hear than we've got another competitor to Outlook and Novell Ximian Evolution that will keep development nice and fresh.
On a related note, where did this K-ism thing come from? It really bugs me, quite honestly. I presume it's from the original "Cool" = "Kool" thing, but considering that the K in KDE no longer stands for Kool it seems to me that it's getting rather tiresome!
You are neglecting the fact that AT&T UNIX was at one time open source. That's how Berkeley got ahold of the code in the first place.It was even free as in beer.
BSD UNIX is not a clone of AT&T UNIX. Through the efforts of Bill Joy and others BSD evolved directly from it.In an open manner. And they gave it away.
That's why AT&T sued BSDI for selling it. . . and lost, because the code was already open source.
KFG
I have a GRUB password so this trick doesn't work on my machine. But there's nothing to stop someone booting my PC from a floppy and stealing my documents.
;)
Point is, there's nothing to stop this happening in any other operating system either, including Windows - unless you use encrypted file systems - again available in most major operating systems including Linux!
So, when people go on and on about this trick as an example of how Linux isn't secure, I just ignore them
perl owes an awful lot to awk
Until they can build in compatibility with Microsoft vulnerabilities, you are welcome to use the Linux virus. It works on the honor system:
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps...
Grub is irrelevent. You can set passwords in lilo too, it's just that no one does.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
The server is slow and may be totally slashdotted soon, so here is a torrent I made which contains all the 11 screenshots in .png format. Please use this instead of the main webserver. (Read about BitTorrent if you're not familiar with it.)
It all goes back to the old saying that if someone has physical access to yuor machine, you're already fucked.
I don't disagree. But that's no reason to make it easy for them...
If the only way they can get in is by disconnecting the hard drive and plugging it into another machine, then by all means make them do that. It's a much bigger barrier to entry than just typing a command at the prompt and will keep out casual snoops. It's also harder to disassemble the case and yank out the drive without anyone noticing.
"I don't recall ever having to install "CRITICAL SECURITY UPDATES" for Mozilla because of some worm going around." Please give me your IP addy. Check this out: one, two, three. I can go on if you want...
Access sucks. So spake the wise Seth. Why? Please grace us with your obviously paramount knowledge of everything software related. And what, pray tell, is the Open Source alternative? Text files indexed through a bunch of perl scripts outputting LaTEX? Sure.
But you go on, saying Honestly, LaTeX has been superior to that piece of closed-source crapware for 15 years. It appears to me that, frankly, you have no clue what Word is since you insist on comparing it to Latex.
Finally, please grow up and stop writing "Micro$oft". It is idiotic. Trust me on that.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
GI Greally Gdon't Ghave Ga Gclue Gwhat Gthe Ghell Gis Gup Gwith Gall Gyou KDE Gusers. Genough Gwith GK!
I am a filthy pirate.
We have the set of standard KDE apps: KMail, Korganizer, KAddressBook and so on, we have Kroupware project that produced Kolab Server and Kolab Client, we have Kontact (which according to its FAQ is supposed to replace Kolab Client) and now we have Aethera.
At my company I'm lobbying for approving a Linux/KDE-based workstation an an alternative for MS Windows-based setup. However, the requires picking up and recommending a single, unified PIM solution that would be used by employees with Linux/KDE setups. With all those competing solutions appearing one by one it's starting to be quite a difficult task.
Fun fact o' the day: KDE originated this pastel shiny look, XP followed.
..but the menus on their web page don't render properly on Mozilla Firebird, which is standards compliant. It looks fine in IE, and I'm sure in Konqueror. I wonder if the developers fell into the "Our web page looks good in the 95% of the world that use IE (and Konqueror), so that's good enough."
I would validate the page and look for the error, but it's been slashdotted since I viewed the page for the first time.
bananas like monkeys.
The point isn't that Linux isn't secure, it's that it's as insecure as all the others.
"Sufferin' succotash."
"I don't recall ever having to install "CRITICAL SECURITY UPDATES" for Mozilla because of some worm going around." Please give me your IP addy. Check this out: one, two, three. I can go on if you want...
I wouldn't declare upgrading to post-1.0 Mozilla a "CRITICAL SECURITY UPDATE". I would call it a "CRITICAL USABILITY UPDATE."
bananas like monkeys.
You obviously have no idea what the hell Exchange is and what it is designed to do.
I know enough about Exchange to know why it sucks, and why open source solutions are better.
Also, I find it ridiculous you make fun of the NAME of "Outlook" while juxtaposing it to "Mozilla". Please... I mean, I have never heard of anyone resorting to namecalling a piece of software in order to win an argument... It takes all kinds, I guess...
I prefer to use names of my own design when referring to inferior products.
Please give me your IP addy. Check this out: one, two, three. I can go on if you want...
Tell me the last time Mozilla was responsible for massive worm propagation.
So spake the wise Seth. Why? Please grace us with your obviously paramount knowledge of everything software related.
Access is a "relational database" in the barest sense of the word. It supports absolutely nothing beyond the basic SELECT, UPDATE, and INSERT statements. Everything else is done using inferior GUI tools.
And what, pray tell, is the Open Source alternative? Text files indexed through a bunch of perl scripts outputting LaTEX? Sure.
Have you ever heard of mySQL?
It appears to me that, frankly, you have no clue what Word is since you insist on comparing it to Latex.
Micro$oft Word is a tool for creating documents. LaTeX (not "Latex," you pervert) is a superior open source tool for creating documents.
Finally, please grow up and stop writing "Micro$oft". It is idiotic. Trust me on that.
I reserve the right to misspell any name I want to misspell.
I'm not Seth Finkelstein. I still speak the truth.
Sure about that?
This is normal in the open source community and actually fairly healthy. What happens is that the community in general sees a need and then you'll have several solid solutions developed in response.
For example, 4 years ago Linux wasn't "Enterprise" enough because it didn't have a journaling filesystem. Today we have several: ext3, reiserfs, jfs, xfs and probably others.
Before that we needed a decent GUI toolset to replace Motif(which was commercial-only). Several sprung up and today we have 2 really solid and widely used ones, GTK and QT.
So while it's confusing today to have so many choices, typically a couple will dominate the "market" once everything settles down.
Actually I agree with the parent comment in theory, but not in practice. In theory, the vast amounts of money spent on UI research at Microsoft should give its products a quality that is unatainable by any other means except copying.
In practice it's quite different, however.
The vast amounts of money just get turned into expensive fluff that no-one actually wants. Microsoft are the Hollywood of software.
OSS developers should not imitate this style. Learn from the independent film directors that style comes from an inate coherent and intelligent taste, not from user panels and marketing research.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
IHBT. IHL. HAND.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
Wow, your wit sure is outstanding. I bet it carves butter like a hot K-nife.
On the other hand, PIMs can be really useful. I'm back to being a plain old engineer, but I still like to keep my address book and calendar in my Palm Vx and sync it up with the corresponding software on the desktop. That way if I'm at a meeting I can look at the Palm to see what's next on the schedule, and if I'm somewhere else (e.g. a doctor's appointment) I can check to see what days are free for my 6-month checkup visit. :-) Some people also sync their email onto Palms or Blackberries or whatever, but I've never seen the point. I'm happy to get away from it for a while.
Getting all of this to work on Windows is pretty easy. You can install Palm Desktop and sync the thing to that, or you can just install HotSync and then use "conduits" that sync up the Mozilla address book, Notes, and lots of other tools.
On Linux, you can use KPilot and KOrganizer. I got them set up on the Linux box at my new job a few days ago, and they seem to work ok. The (big) catch is that I don't really want to store my info in KOrganizer. I want the addresses to go into Mozilla and the calendar entries to go into the weird "Corporate Time" system our group uses at work. Unfortunately there's no CorporateTime conduit for Linux (only Linux and Mac), and I haven't been able to make the Mozilla one work on Linux yet either.
Summary: Linux is getting pretty good in the PIM/groupware department, but it has a little ways to go to catch up to Windows.
Too many graphical things and too much wasted space in the GUI.
... it has no fields. What kind of backwards retarded interface is this?
Things like the graphical "MailCenter" image will never get fixed for UK English spelling.
The View Mail window DOESN'T EVEN HAVE the From: field
I'll stick with the sensible KMail for my e-mail, kaddressbook for my contacts, etc.
AT&T Unix was never open source.
It was distributed to universities under a research license.
The lawsuit issue is more complex, because it was never discussed in court, instead USL and Berkeley settled the case.
Berkeley agreed to remove all the files that still contained ATT code. That used to be called "4.4 BSD Lite" which could not boot, as opposed to "4.4BSD Encumbered" which was a complete implementation.
The free BSD distros of today derive from BSD Lite 4.4
Well, that has never been the goal of Open Source software. Open Source never implies any freedom, that is the Free Software movement. They're two very seperate camps of a smiliar movements fighting against a common enemy - proprietary software.
2. The mockups we saw for Evolution (in my first accepted slashdot story btw
The problem with Evolution (yes, I've used it, as my main client at my last job) is that it won't interact with the Kolab server --- unless some third party writes a free connector for it (there exists one already, I think, but it's a non-free per-seat license).
My main gig right now is Linux integration, and Kolab seems to be the best way to replace Exchange. If I (or my clients) want to pay for software, that's fine, and I'll even use SuSE's OpenExchange Server, but as I see it, one of OSS's main sellling points is that companies can keep their thousands of dollars that they would have spent on Exchange or Notes/Domino, and only pay me the labor to set everything up, and I'll maintain it later if they desire.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
It seems like you don't know what you're talking.
Aethera is KDE software, file dialog problems are in Gnome. But as a Gnome user I don't find them to be so bad. They will be better, but as I'm happy to predict, they'llrock just as any HIG solution in Gnome.
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
Is this one of The Kompany's few GPL projects or is it one if their commercial ones...
I didn't see that mentioned on the pages.. I was thinking this was to be a commercial product, much like their other large projects. Admittedly I stopped following this project long ago when it was pretty much non functional, and wasn't progressing any... So i could be mistaken.
This was *not* meant as a slam, as they have helped out the KDE project on several levels.. I was mostly just curious...( and since Kontact will be free, it would have to prove itsself to be cost effective before i suggest it to clients... )
And really, all kidding aside, the name DOES suck, and one will look silly suggesting it to a CFO in a large company...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The screenshots look ugly! WinXP'ish icons, no anti-aliasing, and the colors........now, at least people migrating from Win3.1 will feel right at home.
Thanks, you may mod me down now.
At least when you have a 'Kapp'.. you can pretty much guess its KDE compliant..
Not 100% accurate, of course, but with the millions of OSS projects, it does help sort thru things..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
But there's nothing to stop someone booting my PC from a floppy and stealing my documents.
Unless you remove the floppy drive....
But this is all silly talk. We all know the only way to keep a system secure is to run OpenBSD.
Then turn it off. Destroy the power supply connections on the HDD and motherboard. At this point, I like to fill the case with cement, it gives it a nice heft, and it looks really cool at the lan parties.
Next, we chop this into 20 seperate parts, which are then in turn chopped into 20 parts. Finally, we soak these in acid, and bury them 200 feet below sea level in concrete. Shoot all those who know of the location.
Your information has never been so secure!
Actually, perl's syntax caused such a large rift in space time that various pieces of it were sucked through a wormhole and appeared in shell, c, awk, sed and uncountable other programming languages.
1) easiest: floppy or CD boot (you can get floppies to change windows admins passwords/enabled(disabled) settings many places, same with linux, or most unixes, though risc based unixes are generally safer, and don't have physical access)
2) if that is locked out: messing with lilo/grub, or windows startup
3) bios passwd (enable floppy or CD see step 1)
4) assuming they have all that, clear the cmos, then go to step 3
5)encrypted: WOW! either they care about security, or have too much time on their hands, which means to get in you will have to brute force it.
6)check for the encryption key in different places
Essentially, you can't keep someone out, and almost all of those steps can be completed (up till 5 or 6) in about 10 minutes (maybe slightly more or less) and none of that requires disconnecting the hard drive.
Either you have constant survelence, the threat of survelence, or you trust the people working with the computers if they have physical access.
Anyone have any news on Chandler? For those of you that don't know about it, it's a broadly similar cross-platform PIM that was announced in a blaze of glory several months ago, and has been stuck on version 0.1 ever since. According to the Web site (www.osafoundation.org), it appears as though things are going on in the background with Chandler, but no new code's being released.
Frankly, I'd settle for just about anything to get away from the Exchange/Outlook combination
Anyone else think of the RPG game The Aethra Chronicles when they read the title of this article?
$8.95/mo web hosting
Yeah, I found it kind of strange that theKompany's web site doesn't make Aethera's license entirely clear. On the other hand, when you click on a download link and get sent to Sourceforge without having to buy it, it becomes pretty obvious that it's at least free-as-in-beer.
And if you download and untar the source code (as I did, because I was curious about this as well), you'll see from the COPYING and COPYING.GPL files that it's apparently licensed under the GPL.
Yay.
You FUDding troll! Linux E-mail programs are not all ugly--I use mutt and it looks beautiful!
<kegObeer> Klez is a virus? I thought it was the lesbian that came bundled with KDE
I looked at their "FAQ" but that didn't have anything.
So, the standard question: it's QT based. So is a Mac version in the works?
Aethera looks very nice, but I think any open-soure PIM - at least any that plan to be cross-platform and compete with Outlook - will require a simple, one-step, "important Outlook mail, notes, contacts, and calendar" feature. If it can do that, people might be persuaded to give it a try. But if they have to retype all their contacts and appointments and lose their email archives, forget it.
Also, one man's junk is another's treasure. I may not like how Evolution looks/feels while you may love how it works. To each his own. This allows personalization within an application type (and also the ability to further manipulate it for your corporate use) and also freedom of dependence.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
One thing I like about evolution is that when you are setting up your filters you can filter on pretty much anything you want, including specific headers. This helps for using things like popfile or spambayes filters which use their own specific headers. Aethera only lets you filter on the plain old stuff (subject, body, to, from, etc - no specific headers). Modifying subject lines is so ugly. But other than that, I like how it operates. And importing from other mailboxes, calendar files, etc. seems to work quite well!
GnomeSkull
http://jdouglasmedia.com/
The case was only settled after the judge refused to hear the main complaint about the body of code because it was already being freely distributed with source.
This left only six files in dispute.
KFG
This software is nowhere near polished enough to succeed in a corporate environment. I don't know why it's been called 1.0, but I'd say it was more at the stage of an early beta. You realise this as soon as it loads up. There are graphical elements that don't fit their boxes, so get cut off, that sort of thing.
The other thing I don't understand is that the menus look more like Tk than Qt. This means that it doesn't fit with other KDE applications, at the same time as looking rather worse.
Use Evolution if you want an Outlookalike, otherwise use Mozilla for mail and Tutos for tracking contacts and arranging meetings.
KDE-apps always look substandard to me
Strange, but that's what I always think about GNOME! Still, it takes all sorts...
--
This sig is inoffensive.
At least the Windows version is. 1. By default the user settings are stored in the c:\documents and settings\usernameAethera directory. There should be a slash between the username and Aethera, if this is not present then nothing works. 2. Switching between screens makes the icons and graphics jump all over the place. 3. Unless you enter the mail account passwords in the settings dialogue and check the 'save password' box, then no passwords are sent to the mail server, hence no mail is received. 4. When accessing an imap server all messages are empty with the subject, date as null and message size as 1k. In short, entirely unusable.
--
This sig is inoffensive.
For me it's crutial that my mailer support this. I am presently looking for a solid alternative to KMail. Does the mailer here support PGP?
Join Tor today!
I've always thought that the next evolution of the desktop would incorporate all these features.
You click on the clock to get your calendar, your address book and instant messenger are one and the same, etc...
I'm not a coder so I've never really bothered to work out these ideas (what would be the point?) but it seems strange to me that I haven't seen anyone trying something similar.... perhaps I'm not looking in the right places?
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
The difference is that MS regularly claims to be an source of innovation (for PR and politcal purposes).
As far as I'm aware, open source advocates do not rely nearly so heavily on such tenuous statements.