I’ve been running the Evolution mail system under Fedora-15/KDE for about a month now, and it has some very serious problems. I just noticed that it is available for SUSE, and figured that since KDE is the principal desktop supported by KDE the SUSE version may be fixed. Before I go through the very tedious process of getting the SUSE version to compile on Fedora, I’d like to know whether anyone has seen these problems with the SUSE version of Evolution:
It ignores font control from the KDE Settings->Applications Appearance window, both KDE font control and GTK+ font control, also its own internal font control window.
It has trouble sending messages to an SMTP server, sometimes taking a l-o-n-g time, sometimes timing out. This can be temporarily cured by restarting it
It crashes when a filter attempts to refile an outgoing message.
It often asks if I want to recover messages that have never been lost.
It often locks up receiving mail from a remote POP3 server.
I can live with these, except for items 1 and 2, since I have workarounds.
If you are fairly sure that you have not seen these problems with the SUSE version of Evolution, please post a reply.
(Of course, this may be the time to switch from Fedora to SUSE )
I can’t really answer your question, I don’t use Evolution.
Though I agree, I can’t say I have seen posts about your issues.
However: I’d say the ratio of users that run KDE and choose Evolution has to be few.
Did you go through the Fedora bug reporting? Fedora is a top class distro, easily on an equal footing with openSUSE.
You could try openSUSE in a VM.
I have bothered the bugzillas and mailing lists about these issues to the point of boredom. Most of them are flakyness or weirdness, which are hard to report and very hard to fix, except for 3, which is reputed to have been fixed in the 3.1.x release serisx (Fedora is still at 3.0.1). Thanks for your interest.
I ran Evolution in Ubuntu flawlessly for several years. I tried to use it on the openSuSE KDE desktop and it crashes every time I initially open it. It may stay open after the 3rd attempt but it is very unstable. I am using k-mail now. It doesn’t have any of the features of Evolution but it is a stable email reader. Is there a KDE release of Evolution? Or, are there add-on’s for k-mail that will give me the calender features of Evolution?
One absolutely frustrating “feature” lacking in k-mail is the inability to move between messages from the message I am in. Specifically, I am unable to view the next or previous message. I have to close the current message and open the next message or I can just open the next message. There is a “next” and “previous” button in the main screen but they just move between the message list in the main inbox list. I tried looking for the same arrows in the toolbar customization tool but they don’t exist.
My preference would be to get a stable version of Evolution working in my KDE desktop. Is there one available?
Uhhh, no I haven’t filed a bug report. It was easier to just use k-mail.
A little more info - I’m just getting started on my search for a solution. I thought it would be better to see if the problem has been addressed already in the Forums before filing a bug report.
Thanks again.
Evolution is a Gnome app. There are no extensions for KDE. Most Gnome apps will do just fine in KDE, but Evolution has been known to have problems. An alternative is Thunderbird. TB has many add-ons to give it nearly all of the functionality of Evolution, and is known to do well in any DE.
Thanks Chief, I’ll look into Thunderbird. The inability to navigate around the messages is getting to me and the instability of Evolution on the KDE desktop is not acceptable. I had just gotten used to using Evolution and was hoping to stay with it.
I was able to import all of my messages from a backup of Evolution into KMail. Does Thunderbird have the same ability? It would be nice if Calenders imported, too.
I like the KDE environment. One feature I really like is the ability to set different backgrounds for each desktop.
Honestly, openSuSE 11.4 has been a real challenge to set up. From the installation (a 4 day ordeal better left to another post), to getting multimedia working, to getting the email client set up. Not for the faint of heart.
> Evolution is a Gnome app. There are no extensions for KDE. Most Gnome
> apps will do just fine in KDE, but Evolution has been known to have
> problems. An alternative is Thunderbird. TB has many add-ons to give it
> nearly all of the functionality of Evolution, and is known to do well in
> any DE.
i sometimes run evolution under KDE4 and didn’t have any problems. if you
start evolution from a konsole instead of the start menu or a desktop
link, the konsole window should produce some error messages when evolution
crashes. these might tell you – or us, if you post them here – what’s
wrong.
I am using Evolution and Thunderbird under KDE/OpenSUSE and everything works great. I use Thunderbird primarily for mail and Evolution for Calendar/Tasks/Memos/Contacts. I sync everything together with my Funambol server, Syncevolution and the Thunderbird Funambol plugin. I moved from Gnome2/Ubuntu about a month ago and did not have any problems getting every thing configured and running properly. I have also installed the following gnome apps that are needed for Evolution to behave properly:
gnome-settings-daemon
evolution-alarm-notify
Once installed, I start these two apps up in: ~/.kde4/Autostart
Also, to get really good subpixel hinted fonts install MUZLOCKER:
With this installed, your fonts will be outstanding. For instance the Firefox and Thunderbird fonts are then as good or better than Microsoft Windows’ “Clear Type” fonts.
Also, I recommend that you install gnome-control-center. When KDE runs gnome-settings-daemon from ~/.kde/Autostart then it is possible that some of the gnome settings may overwrite the KDE settings. This has only happened to me with the synaptics touchpad configuration and I solved it simply by configuring the touchpad both with KDE and gnome-control-center. Everything now runs flawlessly.
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