Freespire and Evolution 2.6.3

I am on the road, visiting our Boston and Toronto offices. Right now I am using the Ubuntu Parallels guest of the Macbook to read my emails and do my calendaring. It is working like a champ.

While here in Boston today, we got to talking about which Linux to use at the house.

Pulling out the ever present MacBook, I booted Freespire under a second Parallels session to show them that, since they had Ubuntu and knew what that was like. I also had Ubuntu up on the other Parallels session for comparision. We were poking around, and I noticed Evolution was on one of the menus. Humm..

I launched it, started to configure it, and MS Exchange was not a choice.

Popping open the Click and Run (CNR) warehouse, I searched for 'connector', which produced 'Ximian Connector'

Clicking that, we went to the install screen. I clicked the green CNR icon. It asked me if I wanted to do that. I clicked 'yes'.

That was it. Three clicks, one search parameter, and Connector was downloaded and installed. I fired up Evolution, which was version 2.6.3, and configured it for my MS Exchange credentials, and then logged out of Evolution. It never goes in the first time on any distro.

Going back in to Evolution, noting the annoying pop-behind-current-screen-password-prompt thing Evolution does when running under KDE (the only GUI on Freespire) does, I brought the password prompt forward, entered the password, and there it was. My MS Exchange inbox. Clicking on the calendar tab, it prompted from my password again... with a note that this was for the calendar this time. As far as I know, MS Exchange will not let you have different passwords for the same userid on the same server for different things like mail and calendar, but I entered it... and there was my calendar and my tasks list.

Here is the cool part: My MS Exchange server is over 1000 miles away via WAN. No problems dealing with latency or anything of that nature. This was 7:00 pm in the evening, so I think" I'll play around with that more tomorrow." Bzzzzt. Wrong. But first...

The person I was talking to about home Linux watched the whole thing, and said “I gotta get that. Thats good”

CNR was impressive, although somewhat lost in the mistaken yipee's about Evolution working. This person who was watching this all is a deeply experienced system programmer who installs software all day long every day. He said “All software should install that way”. It is hard to disagree with that. Of course, I have zero control about where anything is installed this way either, but still... it is very darn impressive.

In any case: Evolution only worked that first time. After that the email bit works, but the Calendar is toast. I click to activate it, it unchecks the calendar immediately. Same thing I saw on OpenSUSE and early versions of Evolution on FC5. I am guessing whatever bug made it prompt for that second password might be involved. Probably a 'running under KDE' thing in there someplace too.

“What is the best Desktop Linux?” (A recent theme...)

For home use, Freespire looks good. CNR is a great piece of work. For office use when you have to use MS Exchange as your server you will have to be determined, and get by with Kontact and Webmail for calendaring. Or Use Ubuntu or FC5 at this point. Probably other distros work as well, but those are the ones I have tested and are working.