Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Ximian Announcements

Ximian Desktop 2, Evolution Released 237

Posted by Hemos from the join-the-masses-grabbing-the-files dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Ximian has released their long awaited Ximian Desktop 2, their popular Gnome-based desktop, and Evolution, their popular email client and calendar program. They can be found on the main Ftp server. You can also check their mirrors."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Ximian Desktop 2, Evolution Released More

Ximian Desktop 2, Evolution Released

Comments Filter:

  • Nuh uh (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Only neither can be downloaded due to dependency problems. Someone needs to check out their installer. The needed files don't seem to be on the mirrors, according to the installer logs.

    • Re:Nuh uh (Score:5, Informative)

      by altp ( 108775 ) * on Monday June 09, 2003 @07:44AM (#6148680)
      Use the mirrors, its downloading fine for me.

      take off the ftp:// and the path and just give it the server when it lets you choose to use a different server in the installer.

      Altp.

  • No time to post.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 09, 2003 @07:43AM (#6148675)
    download now. Troll later.

  • Debian? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Max Romantschuk ( 132276 ) <max@romantschuk.fi> on Monday June 09, 2003 @07:44AM (#6148684) Homepage
    OK, now when can I apt-get install this thing?

    Says the Linux-newbie who wants it all served on a plate ;)

    PS. IF that is now Ximian's site is too slow for me to find out.

    • Re:Debian? (Score:5, Informative)

      by opk ( 149665 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @07:51AM (#6148711) Journal
      You won't. Ximian are dropping support for Debian.

      Though they will release the source so someone may decide to compile it and package it unofficially.

      • Debian is *not* being dropped (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 09, 2003 @09:45AM (#6149520)
        Debian is *not* being dropped. It's simply not supported *yet*.

        Ximian makes most it's money off of RedHat and SuSE so it's obvious they'll want to support those first. Once they get money from these distributions, they'll support other distributions. They used the same approach with the 1.x distribution. Read the "download page" if you want confirmation of this.

        • Yes, Debian is being dropped (Score:4, Informative)

          by reynaert ( 264437 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @10:32AM (#6150022)

          See This mail [debian.org] on the debian gtk/gnome mailing lists.

          On Tue, 2003-06-03 at 14:55, Mark Gordon <mtgordon@ximian.com> wrote:
          > There are no plans for an XD2 release for Woody.
          >
          > -Mark Gordon

          Some people are starting to work on an unofficial woody port. Unstable already contains gnome 2.2 and most interesting ximian patches will probably be applied.

    • Re:Debian? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by jone1941 ( 516270 )
      wget -q -O - http://go.ximian.com |sh

      I would say it doesn't get much easier than that =). If this version is anything like the last it will automagically detect your distribution and use its default package management system.

      • Re:Debian? (Score:3, Funny)

        by GC ( 19160 )
        and that's a very good reason to poison your DNS cache with my very own go.ximian.com record.
      • If you would read the shell scripts you run from untrusted sources, you would find

        bail_nonrpm () {
        echo
        echo "The Ximian Installer currently only supports RPM-based systems."

        Hardly a good replacement for .debs.

      • Re:Debian? (Score:2, Informative)

        by BJH ( 11355 )

        If this version is anything like the last it will automagically detect your distribution and use its default package management system.

        Sorry, no... from the install script:

        # Not running on an RPM system
        bail_nonrpm () {
        echo
        echo "The Ximian Installer currently only supports RPM-based systems."
        echo "For more information about Ximian's currently supported "
        echo "distributions, please visit http://www.ximian.com/."

        cleanup
        exit 1
        }

    • Re:Debian? (Score:3, Informative)

      by samj ( 115984 ) *
      There is an evolution package [debian.org] which is one of many [debian.org] maintained by Takuo KITAME [mailto].

    • I'm going to install my laptop today, and were going for Debian unstable.

      Would really love to install Ximian Desktop 2 too, anybody got any tips?

      Or should I go for Suse instead? (but I love Debian, sniff)

    • Re:Debian? (Score:2, Informative)

      by The Tithe ( 516691 )

      Ximian had indicated on their site for the past year and a half that they would support Deibian Woody once they released version 2.0 of their Ximian Desktop. Suddenly as of a week or so ago, they have pulled that FAQ item and changed their story to indicate that they won't be supporting Debian anymore.

      On another note according to the Ximian Users list Ximian does not plan on providing support for Debian at all, and a group of Spanish developers is going to be releasing the debian distribution separately.

  • Good to see (Score:4, Insightful)

    by barcodez ( 580516 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @07:45AM (#6148688)
    It's good to see that someone is still trying to give MS a run for their money on the desktop. This looks like an excellent piece of software. This release is the light at the end of the tunnel for those trying to use Linux on the desktop within Microsoft-centric office environments.

  • Yes, but (Score:5, Funny)

    by jkrise ( 535370 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @07:48AM (#6148695) Journal
    1. Does SCO certify that this does not include source from MS Outlook, leaked by HP :-) ?

    2. Why use a client that apes Outlook behavior, when better faster thinner clients exist.

    3. How much RAM does Evolution need now, for decent response? Last I tried on my 64MB RAM system, it took 72 seconds to load. About 16 seconds slower than Outlook. And 60 seconds slower than Mozilla mail.

    • Re:Yes, but (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      and 71.9 seconds slower than mutt!

      Since switching away from Windows, I will never again understand the use of graphical email clients... it's like using your TV as a letter opener IMHO ;)

      • Since switching away from Windows, I will never again understand the use of graphical email clients... it's like using your TV as a letter opener IMHO ;)

        You, my friend, obviously don't run a digital photography club.
        I do.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • I've found that most people these days are used to a Webmail-ish interface, as they have their personal email account with Hotmail or Yahoo!. Something like Squirrelmail or IMP is very easy for them to use; I don't have to tell them anything.

        Also, as others have pointed out in the past, Microsoft changes the way that Windows, Office, etc. work with each revision, so you have to retrain anyway. Plus, not everyone would be migrating from Windows.

      • I see your point, but what irritates me w/ Evo is that it repeats so many of the UI mistakes of outlook.

        Case in point: why doesnt the calendar highlight *in* the day view which day is today, when is 'now' (i.e. a coloured line) and when is past (i.e. a darker gray). If you are trying to make an appointment over the phone, it is too easy to accidentally make that appointment in the past, because the GUI doesnt highlight past/present/future properly.

        At least with Evo I can fix such details; with outlook you
    • you mean the linux email client that has microsoft exchange connectors so that users don't have to run licensed copies of windows on their desktops. hmmm....

      i also second the motion regarding end-user training. you just try giving pine to our sales guys and see what happens...
    • Why use a client that apes Outlook behavior, when better faster thinner clients exist.
      Evolution is not just an email client. I don't know of any other clients that support integrated calendar and mail functionality, plus LDAP, vCard, and Palm synchronization. I also don't know any other client that supports integration with Microsoft Exchange (even if that costs extra).

  • Source (Score:5, Informative)

    by riggwelter ( 84180 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @07:48AM (#6148699) Homepage Journal
    I expect it's just an oversight, but as yet there are no source tarballs on either ftp.ximian.com or ftp.gnome.org (well, my local f.g.o mirror, can't get to the real thing at the mo...)

    • Re:Source (Score:5, Informative)

      by luge ( 4808 ) <<gro.yugeit> <ta> <todhsals>> on Monday June 09, 2003 @08:12AM (#6148798) Homepage
      Not quite an oversight; more like a serious fuckup on the mirror syncing that was only discovered very late last night by some very, very tired code monkeys. It'll be corrected once we have bandwidth again. [By fixed I mean 'we'll put out .srpms', since we aren't upstream and hence have never released tarballs.]

      What you really want anyway is http://patches.ximian.com, which still has some kinks (some missing patches, we can't quite tell why) but should have all the changes in much-easier-to-digest patch form.

  • Progress (Score:5, Interesting)

    by js995 ( 608590 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @07:49AM (#6148704) Homepage
    With all that has been said on the issue of GUI's on Linux, its great to see consistently improved releases across the board. Ximian 2 looks great, and the closely tied integration of OpenOffice is the kind of thing that will probably be appealing to those looking to roll Linux out to corporate desktops. Seems to be the 1.0 branch though, which is a shame since there are a lot of useful enhancements in the 1.1 series.

  • For those looking to install it quickly... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 09, 2003 @07:52AM (#6148716)
    Posted anonymously on purpose.

    PLEASE USE MIRRORS!!!

    1. Open a terminal window.
    2. Using the su command, become superuser (root).
    3. Type the following command or cut and paste it into your terminal:
    wget -q -O - http://go.ximian.com |sh

    • Owned (Score:5, Informative)

      by gylle ( 531234 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @08:14AM (#6148809)
      Now there is good advise: Be brave, pipe the contents from an url posted on slashdot by Anonymous Coward directly to /bin/sh!

      Are you kidding?!
      • It grabs the page at go.ximian.com [ximian.com], which is a shellscript, and runs it. Since it's at ximian.com, you might as well trust it.

        • Re:Owned (Score:5, Informative)

          by GC ( 19160 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @08:35AM (#6148953)
          NO.

          There are many DNS servers out there who are vulnerable to DNS poisoning and the go.ximian.com A record is a holy grail for that.

          Please ensure that you are getting the real go.ximian.com, by checking the record with dig.

          Like so:

          dig @gustavo.ximian.com go.ximian.com

          Anyone who doesn't do this deserves to get rooted.

          • Re:Owned (Score:3, Insightful)

            by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 )
            And this is less safe than just downloading it yourself, saving it and running it .... why?

            Sure. If you're going to read every line of the script and check for trojans, then maybe. But 99% of people don't do that, can't do that and never will. So really it's just more convenient this way. Feel free to wear the tinfoil hat if you like.

            Anyone who doesn't do this deserves to get rooted.

            What a ridiculous idea. As if everybody is going to audit the installer in its entirety (you run the ELF binary as root

          • Re:Owned (Score:2, Insightful)

            by sforman ( 214404 )
            And how do you check gustavo.ximian.com points where it should? ;)

            • Re:Owned (Score:2, Interesting)

              by GC ( 19160 )
              Good point... this check only makes a potential hacker need to go one step further.

              MD5 checksums are verifyable against a trusted source for example against a known public key.

              However, you could try the root servers, they are actively maintained and most people would know if they were giving out bogus information.

              dig @a.gtld-servers.net ximian.com
      • This is one of the things that has long bothered me about the Ximian install procedure. OTOH, I'm not sure why I feel that the Debian apt-get is any safer. Or the Red Hat up2date (well---OK, they sign those with a key that's checked against a key you have stored .. most of them, anyway. But not the contribs.).

  • YALGUI (Score:5, Funny)

    by BiOFH ( 267622 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @08:02AM (#6148756)
    Meanwhile Linux watchers everywhere are waiting for the inevitable splinter group to drop off and start its own 'better' version now that a second release has rolled out. Said one caffeine-addled nerd, "We're just too close to some sort of agreement on what works well within the user community. Can't have that."

  • Easy to remove? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by macemoneta ( 154740 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @08:13AM (#6148801) Homepage
    Is it easy to de-install and return to a pristine (current distribution level) state yet? The last time I tried this, which is required when performing a distribution update with Redhat, it required a couple of hours dependency resolution. As a result, I never re-installed after the distribution upgrade. Redhat now includes Evolution, and the new "--aid" option on rpm makes automatically pulling in dependencies much easier (I don't need Red-Carpet).

    • Re:Easy to remove? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by luge ( 4808 ) <<gro.yugeit> <ta> <todhsals>> on Monday June 09, 2003 @08:36AM (#6148960) Homepage
      It's never going to be easy to just remove 200+ packages, so no, you can't just return to a pristine distro. [And anyone who thinks we should is welcome to show us how and demonstrate with an installation of similar complexity. :) But we have gone to a great deal of effort to match our versions, epochs, and package names with those of the distro so that distro upgrades to the next revision of the distro should go more smoothly than it did with XG1.4.
      • It's a one way trip?

        How about if you use the packaging tools to uninstall GNOME2 entirely, then reinstall from the CDs. Would that fix it?

      • Re:Easy to remove? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by passthecrackpipe ( 598773 ) <passthecrackpipe AT hotmail DOT com> on Monday June 09, 2003 @09:05AM (#6149203)
        A question I have had for a *very* long time. Why ship all those packages? Why essentially make a distro-in-a-distro? I appreciate that some of the stuff you would need would require some patching, but why not do what everyone else does, and submit upstream? You are, at the end of the day, not only forking Linux to an extent, but also invalidating any hope of support the unsuspecting victim may have from his original distro. when I orginally got XD1, I noticed Ximian was installing 200+ packages that *were already on my machine*. Not a good sign. More like a sign of hopeless architecture, to me. Not to knock Ximian too hard (I do that in another post ;-) ) , but I would really like to understand the technical reasoning behind that particular design decision.

        Oh, and "can't be bothered / can't convince the upstream amaintainers to accept my patches" is not an answer. So far, all I can see is that Ximian is trying to get the same lock-in on my desktop that Microsoft has....
        • 200 packages is a very difficult thing to maintain. You have up to 200 different versions, and only very few are guarenteed to be completely compatable with the other packages. Otherwise, you're just aiming for a moving target (Developers of GTK1.2 and Gnome2 complained about the specs and packages changing frequently).

          The best way to maintain a stable release of a project that uses all 200 packages is to maintain your own version of all these packages: freeze their version number (feature freeze), and hav
          • Ah, I see. you mean, like the Debian team do, but then different.....

            Seriously, I know what you are trying to say, but isn't that what all distro's do? and if Ximian is doing the same, does that make Ximian a distro? Isn't that the *definition* of a distro?

            The way I see see it, Ximian is just a distro that doesn't implement the base layer, but just layers on top of my exisiting distro. That would be fine, were it not for the fact that that breaks whatever distro it sits on. consumers would now be asking:
        • I'd say (at the risk of losing karma for the sake of honesty, which is still a fair bargain as far as I'm concerned), shortsightedness.

          Initially, Gnome, and then Ximian, seem to have been designed with software reuse in mind -- use existing libs, don't rewrite your own, etc. This is NOT a bad thing. Only... Software changes, grows, evolves. In an ideal world, all this would have more or less remained compatible through versions. But this is not an ideal world, and not all the libs grew in ways compatible w
          • One of the reasons I ran like hell from XD1 was the dependency hell. Maybe XD2 has fixed that. As you say, Maybe XD3 will.

            Just trying to get my brain around your .sig gives me a headache.

            • Re:Easy to remove? (Score:3, Insightful)

              by fault0 ( 514452 )
              Moreover, I ran from GNOME 1.x *in general* because of depedency hell. I hope that GNOME 2.x has fixed this.

              KDE is much, much, much, easier to install by comparison, in my opinion.

      • Re:Easy to remove? (Score:3, Informative)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 )
        And anyone who thinks we should is welcome to show us how and demonstrate with an installation of similar complexity

        Okay, I'll give it a go. You type:

        pkg_deinstall -R gnome2

        on your FreeBSD box (with the portupgrade port / package installed). This will uninstall the gnome2 meta-port (which is a port containing nothing, just dependencies on all of the parts of gnome2, allowing all of gnome2 to be installed by installing this port and all dependencies recursively). It will also recurse upwards through t

  • Oh Slashdot, Slashdot, Slashdot.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by tolan-b ( 230077 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @08:16AM (#6148824)
    Bastards! My download was running sweet at about 100KB/s when this story went up... Now it's on about 8KB/s :/

  • Torrent link? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 42forty-two42 ( 532340 ) <bdonlan@NoSpAM.gmail.com> on Monday June 09, 2003 @08:26AM (#6148891) Homepage Journal
    Anyone have a bittorrent for this one?
  • Is there any way to download the complete package from my windows box (which is fast) so I can install it on my linux box (which is slow) later?
  • I've tried several mirrors and gotten the same problem during dependency resolution:

    The installer was unable to download information about a required channel for this install (Red Hat Linux 7.3 (161)).
    This error may be the result of a network failure. Please verify that your network connection is active and that your network settings are correct.
    Any ideas?
    Thanks,
    Patrick
  • I presume they don't have support for Mandrake 9.1 yet?
  • I run Mandrake, and have downloaded Ximian in the past. However, I always seem to end up in some sort of dependency hell that Red Carpet is unable to resolve.

    Don't get me wrong - Red Carpet has gotten better by leaps and bounds, and when it works, it's wonderful.

    Automated software can only go so far in resolving the mess of dependancies, and I finally understand why it wants to uninstall half my machine before I can download some package. But it still makes me a bit leery to go down the Ximian path with

  • Has anyone got the source to compile on FreeBSD? My lousy ISP is implementing bandwith caps and I want to make sure it will work before I use half of my monthly usage to download this.

  • Will there be RPM packages for these or are they outdated?

    • Re:Red Hat Linux 7.1 & 7.2? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Outdated, but you can upgrade your system to Redhat 7.3 using apt4rpm and the freshrpms apt sources.

      Just go to www.freshrpms.net and check it out.

      I did an apt-get dist upgrade from 7.2 to 7.3 with very little trouble

  • BUY A COPY!!! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 09, 2003 @11:23AM (#6150634)
    Support Ximian by buying a copy (and stop complaining). XD2 looks amazing and I just put my money where my mouth is. Sometimes I feel like the free software community (or the slashdot community at least) are a bunch of crabs in a barrel. And no, I don't work for Ximian!

Slashdot Top Deals

This file will self-destruct in five minutes.

Close