[vox] Dumped Ximian

[Richard S. Crawford]

On Wednesday 29 December 2004 13:02, Rod Roark wrote:
> On Wednesday 29 December 2004 12:25 pm, Richard S. Crawford wrote:
> > After a couple of years of joy with Ximian's evolution, I wound up
> > dumping it this week after a botched sync using a buggy conduit
> > ultimately ended up in me losing all of my calendar and task data from my
> > Linux box, my Windows box, and my Clie.
>
> Wow, that's a helluva bug.  ;-)

Well, to be fair, half the problem was located between the keyboard and the 
chair.


> > I've switched over to KDE 3.3.2 and Kontact on FC3.  KPilot syncs with my
> > Clie perfectly every time.  I've been using KDE exclusively for a few
> > days now, and I can't imagine why I ever preferred GNOME to it.
>
> I also prefer KDE, but we probably owe the googlers a bit
> more than "if you use Gnome your house will burn down".
> What was the nature of the problem?

Well, more specifically, the problem was this:

I upgraded FC2 to FC3 on my box.  FC3 came with Ximian (Novell?) Evolution 
2.0.2.  I enabled all of the conduits, double-checked my USB settings and 
upgraded UDEV to avoid the bugs that had been reported.  Then I clicked Sync 
on my Clie, and things went fine the first time.

The next time I tried it, however, the conduit created an extraneous 6,000 
blank To-Do's.  Yes, 6,000.  I could not delete them from Evolution without 
Evolution freezing on me (thinking it might just be a lengthy process, I let 
it go overnight once, only to find the next morning that Evolution was still 
frozen).  I couldn't delete them from my Palm, which demands that they be 
deleted one at a time, and I didn't want to spend the several hours necessary 
to do it by hand.  So I eventually simply deleted the ToDoDB from the Clie 
itself, and then tried to delete Evolution's ToDo file in its data directory.  
That seemed to settle things down a bit.

The next time I tried to sync, though, it repeated the entire problem with my 
datebook.  So I deleted DateBookDB from my Palm, and again messed with the 
calendar db in Evolution.  No joy.

I felt okay deleting the ToDoDB and DateBookDB from my Clie, since I figured 
that all that data would still be on the Windows XP computer that I usually 
sync this Clie up to (see, the whole point of this was to move away from that 
computer).  When I hooked up the Clie to the Windows XP computer after all 
this, though, the computer refused to recognize it.  I have no idea what 
changed, but I eventually wound up reinstalling the Clie drivers onto my 
Windows computer.  When I attempted to sync again, my Clie crashed 
completely, requiring a hard reset.  This lost all of my data and 
applications, of course, but again I figured it was all on my Windows box.

Sadly, though, when I re-synced the Clie after all of this was done, my task 
and datebook data were gone from the Windows box as well.

I've since found that there is a utility in pilot-xfer which can delete 
duplicate entries on the Clie, but I didn't know about that at the time.  
I've also found reports of several other people who've had exactly the same 
issue with the duplicated ToDo entries on different models of PDA's, and 
there's no word from Novell about whether this is a known bug (I looked in 
their BugZilla database and found no entry, so I created one).

That was when I decided to switch to KDE and Kontact.  :)


> Feel free to move this to vox-tech if appropriate.

Nah.  The issue is resolved as far as I'm concerned.  I hunted on the Web for 
hours looking for a solution to my problem and found nothing on any of the 
FC3, Evolution, or Clie forums.  Kontact works just fine, and I prefer the 
interface and functionality to that of Evolution anyway.  If I had a 
Microsoft Exchange server to deal with, I'd probably switch back to 
Evolution, but since I don't, I won't.

GNOME's fine and definitely WON'T burn down your house or seduce your spouse, 
but I'm finding that I prefer KDE at this point.

-- 
Richard S. Crawford (mailto: rscrawford at mossroot.com)
AIM: Buffalo2K / http://www.mossroot.com
"You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus."
-Mark Twain