Evolution 2.10.3 under PCLinuxOS 2007

After about a week of using PCLinuxOS (PCLOS) as my primary Linux desktop at the office, I have an update to my last post.

Citizenship

If you are a Linux person, and you are living with MS created infrastructure, then one of the things you have to deal with is how to cross-calendar and email with the MS Windows users around you. MS has of course made it all "easy" as long as you do not stray from their application stack. I say “easy”, because actually MS has to work very hard to maintain that. They have a pile of RPC's and undocumented-to-the-world programming interfaces that all the applications have to know about and use or at least tolerate correctly in order to make something like MS Outlook work with MS Exchange. Put a sniffer on the line and watch the conversation MS Outlook has with MS Exchange sometime. It is amazing. What *are* they talking about? :)

There is hope on the horizon: With IBM's announcement the other day about Lotus Symphony, plus things like Yahoo buying Zimbra, and Google's apps stuff (especially now that Google Apps has added collaborative presentations), it seems like the possibility will arise the MS will have to respond to all of this, and hopefully in ways that enable Linux, OS.X, and other platforms users easier access to their infrastructure without issuing messages of second class citizenship.

What I mean by "second class citizenship" is that I often see messages like "You are not running IE: this function will not work. Use IE for a fully featured experience." when I am accessing something on MS Sharepoint. It is true as far as it goes: I am in fact not running IE. Might be because I am not running MS Windows either?

In this day and age there is no technical reason to *have* to run any particular browser. Any standard compliant modern browser should get it done. There are plenty of proof points out there. Gmail works fine from Firefox or Opera, and has every bit the dynamic screen content the stuff in Sharepoint does. From a feature / function point of view, everything that Sharepoint or the like does *should* be available to Linux or OS.X users on an equal basis. All it would take is being Open: using standards and coding tools that were inclusive rather than exclusive. The humorous thing (to me anyway) that something like Sharepoint, a supposed collaboration tool, is that its functionality is exclusive. Its hidden message: “You can collaborate with us, but only if you are one of us.” But as usual I digress.

Evolution Not Evolving

Until something good happens here, we Linuxii must interact with the tools at our disposal. And for MS Exchange, that is Evolution.

Evolution is an optional install on PCLOS, and is packaged up especially for the Distro by the PCLOS packaging team. Here are my current relevant packages:

rpm -qa | grep -i evolution

pidgin-gevolution-2.1.1-1pclos2007
evolution-exchange-2.10.3-1pclos2007
evolution-2.10.3-1pclos2007
planner-evolution-0.14.2-2pclos2007
evolution-data-server-1.10.3.1-1pclos2007
evolution-webcal-2.9.5-2pclos2007

The first thing I noticed about using Evolution under PCLOS is that the packager appears to have fixed a long standing Evolution-under-KDE issue. Perhaps it was fixed in Mandrake or some other KDE place and adopted by PCLOS: I am not sure. PCLOS is very inclusive when it comes to where they get their fixes according to the interview with Texstar in the current issue of the PCLinuxOS magazine, posted on their website in HTML format. The fixed problem is the "Where is the password?" screen prompt behavior / bug / loss of focus. On Ubuntu or Mint or Fedora running KDE, bring up Evolution with the MS Exchange connector, and the password prompt disappears behind the main Evolution screen. Unless you know it is there, you will just sit there waiting for something to happen. With the PCLOS packaged version of Evolution, the password prompt appears, and the main Evolution prompt then opens up *behind* the password prompt dialog. The prompt dialog loses focus but stays on top where you can see it. That is the way the Evolution works under Gnome, so this is goodness.

Evolution looks nice: the fonts are well done and match the rest of the KDE desktop. Anti-aliasing works well on the Dell D620's LCD panel. Stability was good for the first two days. I did not even start with a clean .evolution file in my home directory, but used the one Mint had created.

Evolution started crashing on day three. Well, not Evo, but the back-end "Connector" process. Same difference effectively as I had to restart Evolution to get things back. I put up with that for a couple of days, and then I tried deleting the Evolution information in .gconf and .evolution, and redefining the connection, and went all of about an hour before connector crashed again. This is exactly the same thing as was happening with Mint 3.0 before when it on this same computer, so I am inclined to say it is that Evolution Exchange Connector is still not as fault tolerant as it needs to be. Or maybe it is not as "Microsoft Tolerant" as it needs to be. Or both. Recall that Evolution is not talking to MS Exchange via MAPI and the mish-mash of various RPC's that MS uses to make Outlook connect. Instead, Evolution's Connector talks to Outlook Web Access, or OWA. WebDAV, the Open Standard transport that underlies the current Connector-to-OWA code may be a standard, but that does not mean the OWA is 100% WebDAV standards compliant, or even that the WebDAV standard was not written with some wiggle room in a couple places that allows vendors to create incompatible versions of WebDAV.

Attention Deficit Syndrome

I don't know which of the many possibilities is the root of the problem. What is clear is that the Exchange Connector does not get the same development attention from the Open Source community that other MS interop software like Samba does. Samba being a complete re-implementation of one of the most complicated, most historical baggage protocols ever (SMB) works like a champ. It in fact can out-perform the same protocol in its supposed native OS, or at least it did last time I benchmarked it. This is an example of what is possible when a great deal of time, energy, intelligence, passion, and Open Source community collaboration are focused on a problem.

Connector continues to suffer by comparison. I do not know why. It would seem that the need to do this would be strong. MS Exchange has a huge chunk of the mail server market. Law of averages would seem to indicate that critical mass had been reached ages ago, so that there would be plenty of people needing MS Exchange interoperability from Linux.

Email is easy enough of course. If all I needed was email against MS Exchange, I'd just load up Sylpheed or Thunderbird or Mulberry or any of a bunch of other POP / IMAP capable email clients, and I would be done with it. But part of the MS Exchange exclusion factor is calendaring. For some reason folks like the integrated email / calendar functions, and POP and IMAP know nothing about calendaring.

At the same time, MS Exchange 2003 doesn't work with WebCAL enabled Open Clients. If you want to accept a meeting that an MS Windows user created, you either have to load up the calendar in your web browser, or use the Evolution Connector. In another subtle message of exclusion, OWA will look to see if you are running IE or not. If you are running anything other than IE, you can see and interact with MS Exchange still, but in a flatter, less dynamic way. At least you don't get any messages about being a second class citizen from OWA.

OWA makes a great deal of effort to look a lot like the MS Windows native MS Outlook application. I suppose that is a comfort to some, but I dislike the extra time it takes to load the look and feel stuff. Gmail runs rings around OWA in look, feel, functionality, inclusion... too bad there is not a Google appliance that translates OWA into Gmail. That would be sweet.

Whats up Doc?

So... why the relative lack of attention to a seemingly critical piece of technology like the Exchange Connector? Why the abends? How come we are years and years into this, and still dealing with stability issues like this? it is clearly not a PCLOS issue. I have the same sets of issues on Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, FreeSpire... you name it.

What I have not tried it something like Novell Desktop 10. Right or wrong, I assume that since Open Source is what it is, that Novell will not have implemented anything differently here. In fact, since Novell sells Groupwise, I have assumed that Exchange Connector will be something that the packagers of that distro will not have focused on. If they had, and if they had done anything to make it work better there, why would that not have made it back out to the community?

One possible explanation (and I am totally guessing here) might be that the Open Source community isn't spending enough time of this because they are focused instead on other mail servers. Hula or Bongo perhaps? Open Xchange? Citadel, Kolab, Scalix, or Zimbra? Another I didn't recall? Something where the work of building something as complex as this is simplified by being able to use openly defined protocols. Where the difficulties of testing and integrating are not complicated by also having to figure out the on-the-wire protocols by trial and error. Read the early Samba story and see what craziness they went through to get things working.

Here is an area where I usually try to help by loading up Bug-Buddy and the debugging versions of things so that I can send the diagnostic data back to the people that know the products enough to fix the problems. That might be a problem with PCLOS. In Synaptic, running against the default PCLOS repositories, I did not see the debugging, symbols included, versions of Evolution and Connector. Without those, Bug Buddy's submissions are pretty information free.

Helping

That might be the death of PCLOS on my office desktop. I think the time has come to do some research and find out which distros have what I need so I can submit some Evolution bug reports.

If this gets fixed: If Evolution Connector can stabilize, that should help the Linux adoption rate in ways that little else can. If Linux is to make inroads on the corporate desktop, it has to do so knowing the realities of the data center software lifecycle. Companies have huge investments in things for MS Exchange: backup programs, server farms, virus scanning, spam blocking, email re-directors for email satellite devices like Blackberries. Linux desktops have to live in the current world until time and technological movement take their toll and make these issues moot.

PCLOSisms

There are other reasons I might soon be done with PCLOS. There are many many things I like about the Distro, but there are a few things that are starting to drive me nuts. One is that over the last week at least four different times, while I was right in the middle of typing an email the Dell D620 laptop just went to sleep. It was plugged it. the battery fully charged. There were no power interruptions or other external state changes. I press the power button and it comes right back, but why in the heck did it do it in the first place?

The year old kernel might be part of the problem. The D620 has already been replaced by Dell with a new model, but a year ago it was a brand new laptop. Perhaps it has some new hardware in the guts of the laptop case someplace that the 2.6.18 kernel did not yet include stable support for in September of 2006 when the kernel was new.. ACPI is obviously whacked. My internal fan is just not turning at 8000 RPM.

In the good news column are CrossOver and VMware. Both installed easily, and in fact VMware Player 2.0.1 compiled with via vmware-config.pl with no error messages. That might be a first. The older Kernel operating in its favor probably. The guest seems crisper under PCLOS than Mint too, but that is utterly subjective. Might just be that “newly washed car” phenomena in action.