Fishpool

I installed Fedora 7 Test on my home PC a couple of weeks ago, and encouraged by its smoothness, and wanting a clean upgrade to OpenOffice.org 2.2 and Gnome 2.18, rolled it on my laptop, too. Pretty nice! Apart from those upgrades, I got:

• faster suspend/resume (with a small patch sent to hal-info mailing list)
• out-of-the-box hibernate-to-disk (suspend2 is cool, but not having to install a custom kernel is cooler)
• hot pluggable dual display support and 1280x1024 resolution on an external display (yay, finally!)

These might seem like minor items, but all of them improve daily usability, and I much more prefer regular small improvements to huge changes, anyway. OpenOffice.org 2.2 actually is a relatively major upgrade, with support for dual screen mode in Impress (finally), and improvements in the already-good PDF export functionality.

Only two bugs that annoy me (and I'm easily annoyed), both new, but then again, many others went away:

• NetworkManager starts out thinking I'm plugged into a wired network, even when I'm not
• Xorg sometimes crashes when switching external display on or off (update: fixed now)

Since my new RAZR doesn't have Gammu-compatible IrDA, but does have a "standard" USB ACM connection as well as Bluetooth, I am in search of new solutions for synchronizing my Evolution calendar and hopefully managing my phonebook. This entry is where I'm collecting stuff, hopefully helping someone and even attracting a few helpful comments. Read on, please.

I've been following the development of Evolution 2.0 on and off for some time, primarily having been interested in the improvements of its calendar and webdav support, as I want better interoperation between iCal and Thunderbird users. Yesterday I upgraded to it on our home computer.

The upgrade process went extremely smoothly. I have to say I'm quite impressed by the attention to ease of use in the various Gnome projects since the release of Gnome 2.0 a couple of years ago. Nearly all of the data from the 1.4 installation was migrated perfectly, although I did experience a slight hiccup in outgoing mail settings. I use two mail servers for work and home email, both of which require authenticated TLS SMTP connections. For some reason Evo 2.0 could not send email through either account until I revisited the account settings and changed the "Use secure connection" setting to "Whenever possible" instead of "Always".

The calendar interface with its multiple calendars, subscribable calendars seems like an improvement, although I have not yet tested publishing my main calendar. However, it seems that the publish/subscribe code can not use https URLs - if this is true, that's a disappointing miss, and effectively won't allow me to make use of it.

Running inside an otherwise Gnome 2.6 (FC2) desktop, I miss the Summary view and the Shortcut bar. I have several mail accounts configured, as in addition to the home and work accounts, I keep track of a few shared support mailboxes. I can no longer see the number of new messages for each inbox in one glance anywhere, as they don't all fit into view at once in the Mail screen with all subfolders visible.

I suppose this is a problem which will go away as Gnome tools gain support of evolution-data-server. I know the clock/calendar applet already shows calendar entries (although I have not yet tried it myself), but I'm not sure if the Inbox monitor (which I haven't used since it has required its own IMAP account configuration) has been converted to look at folders through e-d-s. I hope it has, or at least will be.

I've understood Evo 2.0 should be faster than the old version as well, but I have not noticed major differences yet. I'll probably get a better feeling of that once I upgrade on the work laptop, which I use more regularly for email access. All in all, a solid upgrade, but one which does not necessarily bring immediate user-visible benefits. Not worth upgrade if you otherwise stay in a Gnome 2.6 environment, but it is a good reason to look at upgrading to 2.8 completely.

Comment by Ryan on Sun, 21 Nov 2004 22:32:39:
I have run into the same issue where Evolution doesn't support calendaring over https. Very disappointing - and something I think would be rectified shortly?

Got a second monitor, a flat-panel Hitachi at work. Configuring XFree86 for multihead wasn't the most intuitive thing I've done recently, so I suppose this info might be useful to someone else, too.

Right now this is just random pieces of hints, but I'll try to collect some real config examples here once I have everything sorted out to my liking. Update: See my XF86Config file for configurations with all three options mentioned below.

Using Fedora's XFree86 4.3.0, the key to enabling multihead operation is realizing that not only do you need to create another Monitor and Screen section in the XF86Config file and refer to those in a ServerLayout, you actually need to make two copies of the Device (videocard) section as well. This was quite unintuitive, and took me a fair bit of time to understand, given that I don't actually have two videocards on the laptop, and XFree86 would not give an error message in either case.

There are some additional alternatives, however. The GATOS driver has better XVideo support (this is especially true for Rage Mobility, not so much for Radeon), but for multihead, the best choice right now seems to be the MergedFB driver, which treats both screens as a single framebuffer, enabling 3D acceleration on both screens. That is, if your screens are not too big.. Radeon Mobility M7, which my laptop has, supports 3D acceleration on an up to 2048x2048 screen, and 1400x1050 + 1280x1024 goes over that. Oops. Naturally, the configuration of this driver is completely different from the "normal" method, which only a single Device/Screen/Monitor setup, and a bunch of additional options in the Device block (reminds me of XFree86 3.x, actually).

More annoying, though, is that apparently I can't make XFree86 automatically figure out whether the external monitor is connected. I made a script that probes for ddc info on reboot/resume of the system and reconfigures gdm, but I just wish that I could plug in while having a session open - that would help in meetings with the video projector, too.

The second annoyance is that since the displays are different size, my GNOME panels have to resize when the desktop size changes, and for some reason, panel wants to completely rearrange its contents when that happens. Easily demonstrated by switching resolutions with xrandr, too. Update: many of the resizing problems are somehow related to MergedFB, and I've switched to a plain Xinerama setup. That means I don't have 3D accel when using two screens, but I can live with that.

Comment by Davide Bolcioni on Fri, 12 Mar 2004 23:52:36:
Could you elaborate on that ? I am trying to achieve the same result on a Compaq Presario 900 EA (ATI Mobility U1) but the external monitor gets no signal. Using a single Device section the same monitor works, although this just clones the panel.

Comment by oa on Sat, 13 Mar 2004 09:36:06:
You might want to take a look at the XF86Config file I just added to this post.