Archive for the ‘Gnome’ Category

Evolution is Finally Useful

21 Jul 2010 at 21:33

Terry Moore

Gnome, Linux, Ubuntu

No Comment

I have been using Evolution on and off for many years because of its ability to connect to Microsoft Exchange severs.  But I typically will use it for a few weeks only to get pissed off because of random crashes or lockups and go back to using Outlook in a Virtual Machine.  Even though Ubuntu 10.04 was released with Gnome 2.30 it held back the Evolution release to 2.28.  Stupid move IMHO but lucky I have told you all how to update to the latest release.

Well have been using the 2.30 release for several days on my work laptop connected to Exchange 2007 and as the title of this post says, It Finally Useful!  I have not had any lock ups or slow downs.  I did have an issue with it downloading all of my message headers from my inbox but I have over 5500 emails in there so I don’t blame Evolution.  I have since decided to have it download the full emails so that I can use it offline and that seems to have helped.  Also after a rocky start with the Exchange MAPI connector in Evolution 2.28, in 2.30 it works like a charm.  I can send and recieve email, add events to my calendar and query email address in Active Direcory with no issue.

Kudos Evolution Developers!

Update: (2007-7-26)
Looks like I spoke a little too soon.  It seems that Evolution will not send emails periodically.  I haven’t been able to pin point what the cause is but as soon as I do I will be filing a but report.

How to: Install Evolution 2.30 on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

14 May 2010 at 15:22

Terry Moore

Gnome, How To, Linux, Ubuntu

11 Comments

For some reason unbeknown to me, the developers of Ubuntu 10.04 updated Gnome desktop environment to version to 2.30 but left the Evolution version as 2.28.  I think that this version of Evolution is really buggy and the decision was a very bad idea.  In this article I will show you how to upgrade your Evolution version to 2.30 and install the Evolution-mapi client so that you can connect to a Microsoft Exchange 2007 server.

To do this we will be using unofficial Ubuntu packages created and maintained by Jacob Zimmerman.  The packages are located on his PPA page.

Step 1:
Install Jacob’s PPA package repository on your system. Open up a terminal session and type the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jacob/evo230

This will install Jacob’s PPA repository for Evolution 2.30. It will also import the security key.

Step 2:
Update your computer’s repository information.
In the same terminal windows type:

 sudo apt-get update

Step 3:
Next type to upgrade Evolution from 2.28 to 2.30:

 sudo apt-get install evolution

apt will respond by telling you that there are several packages that need installed, upgrade, and removed. Hit the “Y” key to continue.

Now sit back and relax as apt upgrades to Evolution 2.30.

Extra:
If you are in a corporate/school environment that uses Microsoft Exchange 2007 for its email server you can install the evolution-mapi package to allow Evolution to communicate with the server. Remember this is still a very experimental package, however I have found that it is far better in version 2.30 than it ever was is 2.28.
Type this to install evolution-mapi

apt-get install evolution-mapi

This will also need you to hit “Y” to install becuase there are several new packages that get installed to support Evolution-mapi

You should now be able to fire up Evolution and configure it for you email environment.

Note about mapi-plugin:

Here is the response from the evo230 maintainer about the evolution-mapi plug-in

Hi Terry
I’m sorry that I had to remove the mapi package from the PPA for the moment. The latest version doesn’t build properly on lucid, and besides many people experienced problems with that package that could only be solved by upgrading openchange to version 0.10, which is also not possible for dependency reasons. Hope you understand.
Kind regards
Jacob
I will keep you posted if anything changes

Note:

The first time that I open Evolution after upgrading I just got a gray screen.  To fix this all I did was reboot.

Fix Minimize/Maximize/Close Button Order in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

08 Mar 2010 at 22:13

Terry Moore

Gnome, How To, Linux, Technical, Ubuntu

17 Comments

For some unknown reason the developers of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx swapped the order of the minimize and maximize buttons.  Here is how to change it back to normal order.

In Gnome hit Alt-F2 to open up the run box.  Once opened type gconf-editor

Once gconf-editor is open navigate to the apps -> metacity -> general and change
button_layout to :minimize,maximize,close

That’s it.
Update: (2010-05-12)

Even easier way and cooler because its done on the command line is to open up a terminal and while logged in as your user account

Type this:

gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout ":minimize,maximize,close"

Update: Thanks to the comment from LMB you can use this command to add the menu icon on the left side of the menu bar.

gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout "menu:minimize,maximize,close"