FC6 / Evolution 2.8 and Ubuntu 6.10 / Evolution 2.8.1

While Fedora Core is number 3 of the top desktop distros at the moment, behind Ubuntu and OpenSUSE, I don't ignore it here at the office. I can not get past the fact that it will form the basis of future Redhat releases, and we (BMC) support the commercial versions of RedHat and SUSE with our products. Playing with Fedora now... I'm sorry... I mean, gaining experience with Fedora now puts us ahead when some of the features it has that make their way into the server and desktop products RedHat offers.

Number one Linux desktop distro Ubuntu is not at all supported by our products at this time, since it is only a desktop, and BMC focuses mostly on server products. I imagine that would change if customer demand for managing Ubuntu desktops via our Marimba product occurred. Ubuntu 6.10 ("Edgy Eft") just came out though, and I now no longer ignore it either based on recent experience.

I might look at the 'which desktop Linux to use' issue from a BMC point of view, and perhaps choose OpenSUSE or Fedora (number two or number three on the world wide distrowatch hit parade) over Ubuntu. Or I might look at this from the point of view of which one gets the job done, and therefore include not just Ubuntu but others. Today, just Ubuntu will be in scope for this post.

What really matters (to me anyway) is that I live on a full time Linux desktop here at the office, and the distro that works best for me here at the office is the one I am going to use. When you get down to it, Linux is Linux most ways. It is which distro had been best integrated and best tested that really tells the tale. Not for doing the things one uses a home system for, but which business apps are best. Which business app matters the most to me is of course Evolution. Well... OpenOffice too, but it pretty much just works everywhere these days. it is Evolution that has been my pain point.

Oddly, this lets out OpenSUSE as a viable business desktop for me at the moment. The reason is pretty simple, and altogether odd: We use MS Exchange 2003 servers for our email and calendaring (No, that isn't that odd part. Lots of people do that.), and I have to be able to interact with those systems from Linux. The odd part is that with OpenSUSE and it's included version of Evolution , I can not access our MS Exchange servers. I await 10.2 to see if that changes.

With Ubuntu 6.06 and Fedora Core 5, and their included versions of Evolution I can get to MS Exchange. That is of course weird and strange because SUSE bought Ximian, who created Evolution and the Evolution Exchange Connector. The people that own the product have the version that does not work for me.

I will admit I have not tried their commercial SUSE Desktop product. Yet. There are only so many hours in a day.

FC6 / Evolution 2.8.0

My early tests with FC6 RC3 and later the GA FC6 had me very hopeful: Evolution 2.8 was working against MS Exchange, albeit *very* slowly. Calendaring was faster than email, which had be very confused. And I found a new 'feature' that makes me nuts: They took the display of the calendar off the calendar view. Does that even make sense? Sure, I can see my MS Exchange appointments, by day, week, month. But the reference calendar that used to sit above the task list is just gone. I have poked and poked and poked at settings trying to make it come back, but it is just gone. Why? Don't ask me. I assume this is an Evolution 2.8-ism, not an FC6-ism. I'll check that with Ubuntu 6.10 later.

I did find spam checking was on by default, which appears to be part of why reading email was so slow. Even with only 450 emails while I was testing in my inbox (about 17 MB of total inbox data: Nothing compared to a bad day in email land...) it was taking many multiples of minutes to open my inbox via Evolutions Exchange Connector (Really, WebDAV). With Spam checking off it is now it is taking a few less minutes to open the inbox, but it is still... very.... slow.... In fact, no different from what I was seeing on the FC6 RC3. It also does not take much clicking around before Evolution abends. I'll install bug buddy and get all these reported here in a bit.

Occasionally I see other things appear to hang up. I was emptying the trash can, and that just stopped and waited for about 3 minutes, then suddenly emptied. Same kind of thing I was seeing in Evolution, so it actually tend to make me think that there is an issue in FC6.

I would suspect being in a virtual world, except it does the same thing under Parallels on my Mac and VMWare Server 1.0 under Linux. Two completely different OS's, two completely different virtualization stacks, same exact symptom. Maybe a VM problem still : I have seen nothing is the web chatter about FC6 yet to make me think this is a general problem.

Another oddity about Evolution Connector is that I watch it using CPU, but there is no screen indication that it is doing anything. Then, after about ten minutes, suddenly the screen comes to life, things update all over the place, and I'm in.

Same thing for a note in the inbox: I click it, it goes away for a while, then suddenly a flurry of things, and I have the note from the inbox displayed. Looks like something is waiting, times out, and then goes to work.

I read that part of what was better in Evolution 2.8 was memory management and time spent making IMAP work better, so I set up a second account pointing at MS Exchange but using IMAP rather than Connector. It works fine: Very fast. Looks quite useful, other than the fact that IMAP does not help me get to my calendar, and I already have working IMAP via Thunderbird.

I installed the GA release of FC6 over lunch, and when I first booted the VMWare guest there were 7 updates, none of which were Evolution-ish. Two hours later there are now ten. Looks like the servers that have them are taking a beating though. I can't get the updates down at all.

I am very happy to report that the 'bubbles' theme of FC5 is gone. Now we have the DNA with Xmas ornament theme. Much better. No. Really.

I finally got tired of waiting for the built in application updater to work: it appears to look at very few mirrors before dieing. I did a 'yum install yumex', and then had yumex install today's updated. I don't know why, but yumex just seems to work better and finding mirrors and waiting for them to respond. Since it sits on top of yum, I am not sure why this is. 'yum -y update' fails. 'yumex' works. Go figure.

So: FC6/ Evolution 2.8.0 summary: Evolution works, but it is slow and fragile. Unusable for me as a production system. Unless I use IMAP, and for that, I might was well use Thunderbird. Looks like FC5 is here to stay for a while.

Unless I put Ubuntu on of course... :)

Ubuntu 6.10 / Evolution 2.8.1

I was going to post all the above yesterday, but then decided to wait till today, get the new Ubuntu 6.10, put it in the same kind of VM's on the same physical machines and see what it all looked like compared to FC6. First up I booted the LiveCD, configured Evolution, and tested it that way. This is not Apples to Apples (In fact, no Macs at the office today :)  ): No VM involved in booting a LiveCD, but it would at least save me some time installing the VM. If it didn't work this way, no point on proceeding to a VM. But it worked great. Evolution looks nice, performs well, gets the corporate calendar without issue (my main reason for using it) so next it went into a VM: This is VMware 1.0.1 under FC5, same as the FC6 test above.

You got to love the way Ubuntu installs right off the LiveCD. I used to do this with Knoppix from time to time, via the command line 'knoppix-installer' but the last time I did it it just was not as clean as the way the Ubuntu folks have it set up. In fact, the install questions rival LinSpire or Xandros for their simplicity.

With a LiveCD based install you can install and mess around with the distro at the same time. Ubuntu 6.10 came out just a couple of days after FC6, but it has Evolution 2.8.1 and Firefox 2.0 rather than 2.8.0 and 1.5.0.7 respectively. What a difference a few days make.

To make a long story short, Evolution works like a champ. Once Ubuntu is up as a guest, I set up ntp first (always, especially in a VM), then Evolution, and everything just works. It is fast. There is my missing calendar in the calendar view even! Cool! There must be a way to make that appear under FC6. Not that it matters, since FC6/Evo is not working with MS Exchange very well.

Last test: Evolution often works the first time on some distros, but then I reboot and it stops working. So I rebooted the VM, but everything comes back to life just as it should. One weird thing: Bug buddy pops up to report the Evolution failure... the one I have not seen. Not sure why that happened. Maybe Evo was not down all the way when I rebooted or something.

This has me thinking about the FC5 instance running on the T41. It is my main system. But I think tonight it will follow me home as FC5 and tomorrow come back to the office as Ubuntu 6.10...