Evolution 1.5 has Been Released

SirPrize writes "As announced here, Evolution 1.5 is now available for download (obligatory screenshots, for those who want to click and see)" Congrats to all the developers responsible for this gigantic undertaking.

Coming up real good.

[Shivaji Maharaj]

I have been trying the beta stuff on gentoo and works pretty fine. Good work.. keep it up.!!

As an Evolution user for about a year...

[tcopeland]

....I must say, woo-hoo! Evolution is great stuff; it truly is an Outlook killer.

Also, here's a duplicate code report [infoether.com], thanks to CPD [sf.net]. I like the comment on the first duplicate code chunk:

/* sigh, so much for oo code reuse ... */
/* FIXME: put in a function */

Heh.

Gentoo Users

[peterprior]

Ebuilds for evolution 1.5 are on breakmygentoo.net [breakmygentoo.net]

Developer release?

[Delirium Tremens]

From the announcement:

The main purpose of this release is, of course, to gather as much testing as possible from users.

So is Evolution 1.5 a development release? Are they following the same numbering scheme as the Linux kernel? So does that mean that if I am not in a testing mood, I should rather wait for 1.6?

What's the big excitement?

[milgr]

This is a development release. According to evolution's planned milestones, the stable 1.6 release will be out in March.

Like the kernel, the odd dot releases are development.

That said, I choose to use evolution 1.4 for most of my email needs.

This is a testing release

[irix]

This is one of the Evolution testing releases that go along with Gnome 2.5. The goal is a stable Evolution 2.0 and Gnome 2.6 later in the spring. Check out he roadmap [gnome.org].

So by all means, pick up 1.5 if you want to help with bug fixing, but this is not a "stable" release.

Re:Java Desktop

[Delirium Tremens]

I believe Sun has been adding friendly cut-and-paste to their own Evolution version. Let's see if Ximian wants to integrate those changes back into the main product.

Evolution 1.5 Screens

[breman]

calenders [members.shaw.ca]
mail [members.shaw.ca]
tasks [members.shaw.ca]

Re:Developer release?

[irix]

So is Evolution 1.5 a development release? Are they following the same numbering scheme as the Linux kernel?

Yes and yes.

If you don't want to be testing 1.5 then you should be waiting for a stable 2.0 [gnome.org]. Of course, if you can, testing 1.5 is a good thing.

Re:Won't be going anywhere near my systems...

[tero]

As long time mutt user I agree with your sentiments, however I'm quite sure Evolution (and similar 'bloated' applications) are needed if Linux ever wants to take over the corporate desktop world.

I also agree the it would be nice to have a separate Gnome calendar (i.e KDE's Organizer, or whatever it was called) but in the mean while Mozilla Calendar [mozilla.org] looks quite good...

Re:Ximian Connector

[tita]

Call them up and ask them for a tryout version. A coworker of mine did that and Ximian (was still ximian back then) just gave him a version to test.

Re:As an Evolution user for about a year...

[Jellybob]

it lacks the same kind of integration that Outlook/Exchange offer medium and large corporations wanting to standardize on an e-mail, calendar and messaging suite can.

*cough* connector [ximian.com] *cough*

Kernel numbering! it's a devel release!

[luge]

Since the article makes this totally,totally unclear, this is not a stable release. It's a totally devel, in many ways broken, release. Could eat your mail, pets, family, etc. So only download/install if you are brave. Or stupid. Or something. The stable release will go out with GNOME 2.6 in the spring, or at least that is the current plan. Hope that clarifies...

Re:bayesian spam filter?

[illusion_2K]

While this isn't a feature of Evolution per-se, you can integrate bogofilter into it pretty easily [ime.usp.br]. I use it myself and other than a bunch of false positives from a few mailing lists, it's great.

Re:As an Evolution user for about a year...

[damiangerous]

Try using MultiSync [sourceforge.net] with the SynCE [sourceforge.net] plugin.

Yes

[Synn]

Email their support and they'll send you a 30 day trial key.

I personally use it to connect to our Exchange 2003 server and it works quite well. Your company's Exchange server will need OWA support enabled however.

Re:Where's the junk button?

[fea]

you can easily add spamassassin as a filter and it would probably be better than anything that would be hard coded into evolution. I already to this and route the output to a "spam" folder. It is in the evolution FAQ on the ximian web site

Re:bayesian spam filter?

[ewtrowbr]

bogofilter does a wonderful job of plugging into Evolution via the filters. You can match any header string in the inbound email and pipe the mail through bogofilter. A later filter takes anything labeled as spam, and sends it to the spam folder. I catch 90-95% of my spam that way. and I have NEVER had a false positive.

I agree

[crimguy]

Thunderbird has many things going for it as a pure email/nntp app that Evolution doesn't (yet).
1) Spam controls need to be built into Evolution.
2) Customizable icons. Evolution's UI is too big and wastes desktop space. It also looks a bit too Gnome 1.4 . . .
3) Threaded messages don't work particularly well.
4) Pilot syncing is hit or miss for most people (I've gotten it working in the past, but not since 1.2).
5) IMAP controls are a bit weird. Either you empty your trash upon exit, or messages marked for deletion stay that way until you do so. Thunderbird is more intuitive, allowing the DEL key to move messages to the Trash folder.
6) Consistency on each platform. It's nice having the same mail app on Windows, Mac linux and PC linux.

The big plus for Evolution is the groupware features, which I never use. It has a nice calendar as well. Better integration with the Gnome desktop would be nice.

Re:Built-in spam filtering?

[FattMattP]

Run Spamassassin as a daemon (ie spamd) for speed and use Evolution's builtin filtering tool to define a pipe to shell command filter (ie spamc -c) with the rule being if does not return 0, either move to your spam folder or just delete it. Make sure bayesian filtering is enabled in spamassassin, do some training via sa-learn, add you will have great spam filtering with very low overhead.

They need something intergrated into the application so that they can click a "spam" or "not spam" button and/or change spam settings from within Evolution. See Mozilla Mail to see what I am talking about. Your solution still requires interacting with the shell (something these users don't know how to do) to change settings or train the bayesian filter. Right now I already have spamassassin checking mail on the server side.

Re:for single users, not enterprises

[Zak3056]

But how about Calendaring and Tasks being stored on the server *AND* processed with the server?

Evolution talks to Exchange, though you have to pay Ximian a license fee for the Exchange connector, and still have to pay Microsoft for the Exchange CAL. I find that to be financially not practical at the moment, and don't see how anyone could convince their management to move into such a scenario, but the option IS there.

Re:Won't be going anywhere near my systems...

[mccalli]

Dumbass, The world already has moved way past you. We are talking about GUI stuff for the masses NOT the Unix Phil, BIG difference.

Apple would disagree with you. Apple's approach is to separate out the address book, calendar and mail applications - they all interoperate, but they're all different applications. So far, the only slight glitch in this is the lack of import of birthdays between address book and calendar. Other than that, the approach works really well.

I'd argue that Apple are rather more geared to the consumer than they are to Unix Phil, but they've shown that you don't need to abandon one in order to please the other.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:less like Outlook, strange UI things

[Anonymous Coward]

The shell--the overall interface that allows you to navigate between components and folders and whatnot--has been rewritten for 1.5/2.0 to allow the components to be used as standalone applications, and to simplify the code. That said, the shell's UI is under intense change. It is hardly being ignored:

* The component buttons mockup [ximian.com]
* Addressbook UI thoughts [ximian.com]

Those are discussions from this month alone.

~ac

P.S. The 'Component' button is a stand-in, and the use of 'Local' instead of 'On This Computer' was probably in an old build. I believe current builds, including 1.5 use 'On This Computer' everywhere. This is a development release after all.

Re:Still no note/memo support??

[steveha]

Hear, hear.

I still use JPilot [jpilot.org], even though I use Evolution, because I really want access to my notes.

Evolution developers: please add a "notes" feature to Evolution. Just like on a Palm PDA, the first line of the note should be treated as a title, and there should be a title view for picking a memo. There should be searching within the memo text. The memo feature should use the same character set as the Palm uses so that accents and such display correctly.

P.S. JPilot has plugins, and I'd like to see the same plugins for Evolution. The top one I want to see: Keyring [sourceforge.net], the password vault.

steveha

Re:Windows drivers are bundled

[AstroDrabb]

Unaccelerated means that dialog box painting, web page scrolling, and Flash animations will run like molasses. Yes, Flash animations are important to novice users, many of whom frequent Flash portals such as killfrog, newgrounds, and the like. If painting and scrolling are slow, then "this computer is slower than the one that came with Windows."

Debian is based on older code. Fedora Core 1 supports my Radeon out-of-the-box with 2D and 3D acceleration. ATI does release specs on their cards. They just keep a few things proprietary. If you want that little extra that ATI keeps, you can download their binary driver. NVidia on the other hand does not realease specs, though their proprietary drivers are top notch IMO and work great under Linux.

Also there are two types of accelration. 2D and 3D. If you are using Debian based on older code, you may not have 3D acceleration, but you will still have full 2D acceleration, so your flash, web pages, dialog boxes, etc will *not* be slow. In fact you won't even notice that there is no 3D acceleration under an older code base such as Debian until you try to run something like Tux Racer. If you want that 3D acceleration, use Fedora or SuSE. The Radeon on my laptop has very fast 2D and 3D and the GeForce 3 Ti 500 on my desktop has very, very fast 2D and 3D with the NVidia binaries, both under Linux.