The devolution of Evolution

If you use the KDE desktop you're probably using the wonderful Kmail mail user agent (MUA)/program. I love Kmail because of it's simplicty, and like my friend Marcel Gagne, I like my mail program to be separate from my other software. For various reasons I recently switched to Fedora Core 4 and I chose Gnome as my default desktop environment. Gnome uses Evolution as a Mail/Contact/Calendar/Task manager. I would normally install Kmail as my primary email client, but I decided to give Evolution a chance because we have an Exchange server at work, and Evolution is suppose to synchronize nicely with the Exchange server.

That chance I mentioned above has become frustration! Right now I feel like a first class idiot. The task I'm trying to do is really simple. Kmail has a daily journal feature, Evolution does not, but it does have a tasks section. I used Evolution's tasks to make a quick note of a bill I paid today. Then I closed Evolution and loaded it up again - the task was gone! I tried a second time, same results. Then I noticed that if I right clicked in the left-hand side of the tasks windows I could Save As. I tried that a couple of times. The first time it wouldn't save, the save as dialog box just stayed on the screen until I closed it manually. The second time Evolution crashed when I tried to save my .ics file locally. I tried again a few more times just to make sure it wasn't an intermittant problem, sure enough, same problems.

Fine, it could be a bug in the current version of Evolution that comes with the Fedora Core 4 disc, I can accept that. What I can't accept is the poor implimentation of the tasks. Tasks should be auto-saved, they should re-load when I load up Evolution for a second time. I shouldn't have to manually save the tasks.

To compound my frustration, I've been trying to update Fedora Core 4 for the past 3 days. All the updates are downloaded, but FC 4 just sits at the stupid Up2date Package Retrieval screen. I've left it now for well over an hour and it's done squat! This has been a problem with Fedora Core for a long time now. I think whatever bug that causes this problem was introduced in Red Hat 8, because I seem to remember I never had a problem with Red Hat 7.2, and that was on a much older, and less capable machine.

Because up2date has been so wonky for the past millenium (it seems to work on some machines, but not others - worked well on a similar machine to this one, but with 768MB RAM), I've been using up2date-nox -u for the last while. Unfortunately, I seem to have run into a brick wall, because up2date-nox seems to hang the same way the graphical up2date hangs. This machine, my notebook, isn't misconfigured. My notebook has okay hardware, PIII 1GHz, 256MB RAM. This problem shouldn't be happening. I can understand a new user's frustration with Linux if this is the kind of quality they see in software. Luckily, I've been at this game awhile and KNOW that Linux has a lot fewer problems than Windows. During my rant Fedora Core 4 started to finally install the packages I updated using up2date-nox -u. So it seems the issue is a memory one. The non-graphical up2date-nox is a bit less slick than up2date, but on less than half a gig of RAM it seems to be the way to go.

One last thing I thought I would mention. My local download mirror didn't come with signed packages. In the graphical up2date I kept having to accept the packages without signatures. In up2date-nox I simply added --nosig to the options and voila, I could walk away and up2date-nox would do everything for me without requiring my intervention. The complete command to update without requiring signatures is:

up2date-nox -u --nosig

Be warned! Updating without a signature is not a good idea unless you absolutely trust the source. I would never accept a third party RPM without a good signature because the software could contain a back door, especially any software that is only released in RPM format without source to look at.