A serial Blog entry about installing Debian 5.03 in a Dell D620 to see if Evolution / MAPI works there.

I can not recall the last time I have done a plain Debian install. I do know that they did not have the graphical installer yet, so it was a fair amount of time ago.

Even though my primary Linux is Ubuntu (9.10 these days), which is Debian based, Ubuntu is not Debian. Ubuntu is not even, as near as I can see, a mix of custom packages layered on top. It is a complete repackaging, starting with Debian. Seems like a lot of work, but it is hard to argue with Ubuntu's success.

Success except that Ubuntu still does not have a version of Evolution that works against MS Exchange 2007. It is coming. Very very slowly. I read today that the critical packages I needed to take a stab at a working Evolution was already packaged over in Debian. This would be to bring the MAPI support from 0.28.0 to 0.28.1 like the rest of Evolution already is in Ubuntu 9.10. There is a bug to track getting MAPI up to speed in Ubuntu:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution-mapi/+bug/472552

...but I think it would be fair to say that the rate in which the Ubuntu team has worked to get Evolution stable and working with Exchange has been lethargic at best, and at least in this they are no different from of the other majors, since no one has the 2.28.1 yet... Except Debian. And of course, Gnome.

http://packages.debian.org/sid/i386/evolution-mapi/download

http://git.gnome.org/cgit/evolution-mapi/

I do not know how this got missed, except that perhaps no one at any of the projects has MS Exchange servers and so they do not pay much attention to it. Just a guess though. It clearly lags behind the other features of Evolution. Another thought would be that most in the Linux community in general think more like the Fedora community in particular, and prefer open standards and protocols rather than closed, and supporting Exchange may feel like a betrayal of those standards?

I am *not* stating any of this as fact, just speculating why in the world the MAPI support so desperately lags in Linux, and Evolution. OS.X has had working MS Exchange support since August: Clearly no one in Linux land is feeling any heat of competition with Apple. I know Apple did not go the MAPI route with their support, but at least MS Exchange access works in OS.X, and actually works very well.

Knowing that the four fixes that should repair at least in part my broken Evolution are present in Debian, I dusted off the old Debian skills, and downloaded the 'new' 150 MB network starter CD, with graphical installer. Already this is light years ahead of the last time I installed Debian.

Debian Install

The new Debian graphical installer is nice, but it does not support my external monitor / keyboard / mouse from some reason. Not even as mirrored displays. That is really old school.

The first sticking point was that it did not have the drivers for my wireless card. I did not care, so I made it skip that and just used the wired interface, noting I'd have to fix the wireless later: it is only a 150 MB install image here. No way it has everything it needs out of the box, and I did not expect it too.

Next problem was my /home directory. I am installing this over the top of OpenSUSE 11.2 RC1 on my Dell D620 laptop. Gold comes out tomorrow, so if the Debian experiment flops, that will be my next install. The problem is that both Ubuntu 9.10 and OpenSUSE use Ext4, and Debian 5.03 150 MB installer disk only has Ext3. My home directory is formatted in Ext4, and Debian can't deal with it. I told it to ignore the partition, and now had a second thing to fix post install....

I picked the 'laptop' packages to add them to the basic desktop and core set, and turned it loose. The installer chugged along for about 30 minutes downloading and installing things. Finally it asked my if I wanted GRUB to understand the Windows 7 partition, and it was done. A quick reboot onto a fairly back-level 2.6.26 kernel (Ubuntu and OpenSUSE have 2.31), and I had a mirrored display and was able to log in to Gnome. The default Gnome desktop was clean, and the Debian default theme easy to look at if nothing earth shaking graphically. As an experiment, I pulled the CDROM, installed a battery, and the power manager instantly saw the extra battery. Looks like I had the laptop packages alright!

As Han Solo once said "Don't get cocky kid!"

Old Old School

Debian is an interesting animal. At any given time it has three versions: Stable, Testing, and "sid". I was looking at the current stable version, release 5, codename "Lenny". Lenny is really really out of date, once you get to looking. Gnome was at 2.22. That means 2.24, 2.26, and 2.28 have come out *since* Lenny. Lots of water under that bridge, including all the MAPI support in Evo. Ubuntu had revved three or four times since this level of Gnome. Also, there was no way to enable dual head support in anything I had installed: the monitor tools I was used to in OpenSUSE or Ubuntu were not installed.... of course, I had just over 900 packages installed, and Ubuntu and OpenSUSE default to twice that in their base installs easily. Another thing to hunt down...

To get to testing or "sid", you start with Lenny, and change the install repositories to enable allowing packages from further upstream. the Evolution MAPI 0.28.1 I want is *all* the way upstream, in sid.

sid is what Ubuntu is based off of, and it is quite stable over in Ubuntu, so my hope is that Debian is just very very very cautious, not that one of the reasons that Ubuntu is completely repackaged is because they had to rework *everything*. Even if they did, that would have fed back to sid, and so it should be fairly stable, if not perfect. I am not looking for perfect yet, just a working MAPI connection to Exchange.

I manually edited /etc/apt/sources.list and added sid, reloaded, and started to install Evolution MAPI. Synaptic can not deal with this at all, so I had to do it from the command line. su to root, and then apt-get install evolution-mapi

MAPI would not install, because Gnome was back-level, so that became 'apt-get install evolution-mapi gnome'. That broke another thing, so I added that new thing that needed explicit upgrade permission. And another thing. And another thing.

Oh. yeah. Now I remember why I had not done a Debian install in a while. It is coming back to me. I finally get enough things added that apt can figure out the rest, and installs 478 new packages out of sid, replacing over half of the packages from Lenny. Most of it is Gnome stuff. The general theory I have for this type of work is to only install the minimum I have to, to try and stay in the Stable tree as much as possible, but that theory is not looking good.... I guess at that point to get Xinerama going will take replacing xorg with the current version. Who knows what it will take to get the wireless going... But I stick to the theory. I want to see working Evolution before I get too wrapped around the axle about anything else.

Debian stops to ask me a few questions about restarting services and whatnot. Nothing new there: still curses based questions, even though I had done a graphical install. This many packages, with pauses to ask for things, takes a fair amount of time to get through... most of an hour in fact. Part of it is the size of the update, and part is the fact that the D620 laptop hard drive is well... a laptop hard drive. I while the time away by working on this post via Google Docs, and thinking about how to integrate Google Wave here.

Before I figure Google Wave out, the install finishes. I reboot, and X won't start. Nuts. From console login: 'apt-get install xorg'. 48 more packages. Much whining in the boot messages about needing to upgrade the kernel, but it boots, and goes into X. Opps: Forgot to install the MAPI package! 'apt-get install evolution-mapi'. 9 more packages.

While I am at it, I loaded up the firmware for the Intel wireless card via Synaptic It was easy, and the wireless now works... too well. Our Access point is outside the firewall, and the laptop *prefers* the wireless connection to the wired one. To get access to the internal network I have to disable the wireless and enable the wired, eth0 type connection. I see no easy tool for this, so I do it all from command line. Really starting to miss the spit and polish of Ubuntu or OpenSUSE for things like this.

Bingo

I can see my Inbox. I can use the actual server name in the account setup. The email addresses in the inbox are valid, reply-to-able addresses. The speed to load the Inbox is not great, but it is way faster than the last release which took forever to load the inbox, right before it crashed.

All of this waiting, just to get to a valid inbox. No GAL. No Calendar. Just a working if slow inbox. I should have been more specific when I said "Working". I want to be able to calendar, at the very least, and while I can use LDAP if need be for the address book, a more native GAL implementation would be nice.

And I am in a totally unsupportable place, with a hybrid of Lenny and sid. If you read through the Debian web pages about installing the Distro, they are quite upfront and even snarky about getting off into the woods if you are not a full fledged developer who can pull themselves back from the edge. You want stable Debian, you stay years back of the leading edge. Or you use a Debian based Distro like Ubuntu, although that last bit of advice is not on the Debian web site.

Back to waiting.. and got to get OpenOffice updated on Debian. OO 2.4 will not cut it when 3.1 is right there, just 48 more sid packages away... And OpenSUSE 11.2 Gold should be out today.

PS: Extra geek points for knowing where the title of today's post comes from.

I mentioned in my Enterprise Desktops: Linux, OS.X, and Win7 post that I never expected to see OS.X pass Linux in the race to MS Exchange compatibility.

OS.X 10.6, codenamed "Snow Leopard" got there first.

As a Linux maven, this has been a hard loss to accept, but as I also have a Mac, it has been an easy loss to accept... Yes: I am feeling very split-brain about it all.

Just to be sure, I loaded up Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4, and updated to the very bleeding edge, to see if Gnome 2.28 / Evo 2.28 and its built in MAPI support was going to catch up, or even be close. But it has not. It is not even close yet. When I try to enter the server name or IP address in the setup dialog, it just crashes, and it does not even ask if I want to report the problem. It's Alpha, so I can not really criticize it. I was just hoping. I was just looking for a glimmer of MS Exchange 2007 interoperability light.

To be even more sure I loaded up SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (SLED 11) and applied all the maintenance. I can enter the MS Exchange server by name rather than address, but the GAL (Global Address List) does not work, and calendaring hangs. I am told some have working calendars, so this does appear to be variable, but it does not work on my calendar, as built up over the years, so I assume that it will not work for others as well.

I also built a SLED 11 appliance with SUSE Studio (very cool) and had the same results.

Last try: I downloaded OpenSUSE 11.2 Milestone 6 and installed it, but that does not have MAPI in it at all yet.

OpenSUSE 11.2 and the GA of Ubuntu 9.10 are still months away, and I have no idea if full MAPI is going to make it even then. The forums I watch about the subject have been very quiet about MAPI status. The Wiki has:

• http://www.go-evolution.org/Evo2.28
• http://www.go-evolution.org/MAPIProvider

But the last updates there are severely out of date. I scoured the forums, and Googled with fervent hope, but at the end of the day, OS.X was there with fully functional MS Exchange support, and Linux is not yet.

Nope. This round goes to OS.X. That is not to say that the support for Exchange in OS.X is perfect yet. I found a bug with scheduling meetings this morning. I have not seen any public discussion of this problem yet either, but then 10.6 is brand new, so there may not have been time. It appears to be an issue with the Global Address List (GAL) looking up the name.

I am also having another problem, but this appears to be a MS bug. The 'affinity server' is, after 3 days of steady use, suddenly rejecting my password. It is my password though, and I can not seem to convince the affinity server that it is OK. Whatever this little issue is, it locks out my Mac from email, but Linux (using IMAP) and Win7 (using whatever RPC's and MAPI bits Outlook 2007 uses) are both still able to access the Inbox.

There is an easy "work around" though: Look them up in the address book, and then drag and drop them on the appointment. In retrospect this is probably what Apple thought people would do anyway, rather than trying to do direct adds in the meeting itself. Its kind of funny: the meeting invite is sent the second that the person is dropped onto the meeting, rather than when the edit of the meeting is finished. But it works, and very well.

All of this does not even count the fact that MS will release Outlook for the Mac too, so that there will be two ways to access the Exchange server on a Mac. Outlook does not arrive till the end of 2010 though, so the built in MS Exchange 2007 support in OS.X will have plenty of time to mature and have a great deal of uptake.

The reason that this all works is probably that Apple did not take the MAPI/RPC route with 10.6. They are using Web based API's. I traced out a conversation with MS Exchange just to verify this was true. In this regard it seems like that the MS Exchange support in 10.6 is a bit like the Exchange Connector support used to be in Evolution... except that was WebDAV based, and with MS Exchange 2007 WebDAV is dropped in favor of these new API's.

This is also why 10.6 only supports MS Exchange 2007 and not 2003 and earlier. When MAPI / RPC support is finally fully working in Linux / Evolution it will have that over 10.6: MAPI / RPC means that Evolution will be able to talk to any version of MS Exchange all the way back to 5.5 more than likely. But then Outlook will arrive in the Macstack at the end of 2010, and probably negate that advantage, unless MS releases a Web API only version of Outlook. They might... never know.

The Mac I am using for all this is a 3.5 year old unit, and 10.6 has also had the side effect of making the unit feel like it has had a new processor installed. The system has a 2.1 Ghz Core processor (not Core 2) and 2Gb of RAM, and while it has never felt slow, it now "feels" every bit as fast as my Macbook with 4GB or RAM and 2.4 Ghz Core 2 processors. I used the word "Feels" there very intentionally, since I have not done actual objective measurements. Still, Safari seems to snap open, and Filezilla seems to transfer things with great speed, etc. The mail.app is quick, and the interface clean. The emails are sent quickly.

Does all of this mean the Mac is now "Enterprise ready"?

I have read this question over and over in the trades, along with endless (and endlessly vapid, IMHO) 10.6 / Win7 "Shootouts" and "Death Matches" and other similar cruft.

The answer is of course "Yes". Unless it is "No" in your shop.

MS Exchange is at something like 50% market share in the email server space, so having this support was critical *if* you are in a place that uses MS Exchange. If you were in a place that uses some other email server, or maybe have it SaaS'ed out to Google Apps or something, then you already were ready to use a Mac in the Enterprise. Whether or not you do is probably more about the size of your organization, the enlightenment of your IT department, and so forth. I was talking to one person recently whose IT department had a very cool hardware standard for their laptops: They gave folks a budget and they bought whatever they wanted to schelp around. If they bought a Windows based unit, it had to be locked down with a corporate software stack, but OS.X or Linux were not nearly as restricted.

Right after I was told about this, I got curious what I could buy for their stated budget. I have done this a couple times in the past, but I wanted to be sure the numbers had not changed much. According to a couple of vendors online configurators, that I could get a Mac for about the same price when configured the same way. And I got the Macbook unibody to boot. To be sure, I could not buy a 500 dollar Mac laptop or anything: I was comparing 13.3 inch screened, 1033 Mhz buss'ed, fast, large disked, corporate units only. Combine this with what, at least for me, has been a high level of reliability / durability / schelp-ability, and I can see why some would want to bring their Macbooks into their office settings, rather than their normal habitats like graphics studios and print shops and Hollywood offices and other parts of the creative world.

In the very strict confines of an MS-infrastructure-only shop, Mac's were historically harder to use: Same as Linux. Also like Linux, Macs have the same coping mechanisms now. Examples:

• Office Apps:
  • OpenOffice  (Have had NeoOffice for years): I just loaded up 3.1.1, and it has had no problems with an MS formatted documents
  • iWork:
    
    • Pages opens MS formatted stuff as well, and usually with high fidelity.
      
    • Ditto Keynote for PowerPoint.
    • Numbers: I have had slightly less luck with Numbers. The problem is, as always, macros, although it also does not like outlined and sorted spreadsheets. Numbers is the new kid on the iWork block, and it is a great spreadsheet on its own: it is just not fully MS compatible. Yet.
      
• Browsers:
  • Firefox
  • Opera
  • Chrome
  • Seamonkey
    
    • I like the Composer HTML editor. NVU stopped at 1.0 and its child Kompozer often goes stale (although I see some movement over in Komposer, and I am using both Composer and Komposer on this post on 10.6, to see what is what. Komposer is buggy and feature-full, and Composer is solid and feature-few. Sigh.)
      
  • And of course, Safari 4.

... and so forth: OS.X has benefited greatly from the Open Source world, to be sure.

And Of Course, with Web 2.0+ All This Matters Less Anyway

As the screams around the Internet reverberate every time Gmail has a multi-minute outage, it is clear that a huge part of the world now uses online infrastructure rather than dedicated, installed in the computer or personal datacenter based infrastructure. Out there in Cloudland, you need a computer to access the cloud, and it matters not if it is a Mac, Linux (or some varient / imbedded version of it), BSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, or something else. All that matters is if you have a good standards compliant browser available for your platform. That was the idea behind the Netbook, and my Dell Mini-9 came with a 2GB SSD hard drive: Enough to run Ubuntu and a browser, and it works extremely well.

The more standard (as in Open Standard) the less the client platform matters. The trends are that the people using one platform will be able to communicate with those of all the other platforms, and never know if they are talking to someone like them or not like them, computer-choice-wise.

That is good for Linux.

Or, looked at another way: I can tweet from anywhere. And anything. Change "tweet" to be whatever you need it to be.

A while back I replaced Mint 4 on my main production desktop system (A Dell 745) with OpenSUSE 11. Since then I have been loading up every update that OpenSUSE has released on a nearly daily basis. The good news is that in almost every way, OpenSUSE 11 is a terrific release, and light years ahead of where it was when I first started messing around with SUSE back in the release 5 days.

Everything is better: YAST. multihead graphics support. updating software. I did not leave OpenSUSE because I did not like it.

I left it because with its Gnome 2.22 desktop it was running by definition Evolution 2.22, and that was becoming a real problem. Evolution ultimately never turned out to be as stable on OpenSUSE 11 / Evo 2.22 as it was on Mint 4 with Evo 2.12. I stuck with it so that I could keep feeding the bug reports to Evolutions development team, and that in fact was why I decided to move.

Every single bug I had reported had turned out to be a duplicate of an already repaired bug, and most of the repairs were in Gnome 2.24 / Evolution 2.24. I was wasting my time and the Gnome teams time, so I quit reporting it every time Evolution crashed. But it did crash, all the time. A good week was a week of seven days of runtime before a crash, and a bad day was three or four times a day.

I get my email and calendars off an MS Exchange 2003 server. This stuff has to work for me!

At the same time that all this was going on I was watching the progress of the Evolution MAPI service provider.  They had hoped to make the 2.24 release, but unsurprisingly they had to move to 2.26 of Gnome instead: Even with the documentation of the MAPI and related protocols available due to the EU's Microsoft Anti-trust actions, it was / is a pile of work to unwind that and make it work with Evolution. MS has been continually updating MAPI for years with each new release of Outlook and MS Exchange, and it probably bears small resemblance at this point to the old Open Protocol Simple MAPI that MS published many years ago.

I had been hoping that MAPI would make 2.24 for one very simple reason: While I am on an MS Exchange 2003 server *now*, the minute the IT folks decide to upgrade to MS Exchange 2007, it is all over for the Evolution Connector. Connector relies on the fact the MS used a version of the WebDAV protocol to create the web interface to MS Exchange 2000 and 2003. MS, for whatever reason, dropped WebDAV for the web interface of MS Exchange 2007.

With MS Exchange 2007 in place, and with no native MAPI connector in Evolution, I would have to get to email via either Codeweavers running MS Outlook, the new Web interface, or possible IMAP if it is enabled, although that would not give me access to my calendar or contacts. In fact, if the EU had not done what they did, with MS Exchange 2007, I would have no chance of a native MS Exchange client ... even one that crashes.

So: OpenSUSE version of Evolution crashing. OpenSUSE 11.1 not out till December. MAPI not out till Gnome 2.26 at the earliest, but I am still on MS Exchange 2003 for the moment. Looking through the release notes for Ubuntu 8.10 beta I saw they were using Gnome 2.24, which meant Evolution 2.24, and all my crashes are supposed to be fixed there. May be new ones, but at least I'd be reporting real problems!

My history of Ubuntu installs made me feel that the chances of the Beta being stable were pretty good, so I decided to go for it.

Ubuntu 8.10 Install and Evolution 2.24 Upgrade

The 8.10 install was the now-normal Ubuntu install, and still has the graphical time zone chooser that I dislike. The disk partition stuff is much nicer looking, and worked well on manual to let me set up the disks the way I wanted. I keep '/' separate from '/home' so it was easy to re-format '/' and have OpenSUSE be totally gone.

After a very fast install, and the usual updates and re-adding packages I use, like 'hfsplus' and so forth, Ubuntu booted right up. I do mean right up. Fast! The OpenSUSE boot was not slow, but this one just flew.

Next, I moved .evolution to .evolution.suse11, brought up Evolution and redefined my WebDAV access to the MS Exchange server. I brought that down, then copied my filters and folders from the .evolution.suse11 back over to the fresh new .evolution, and brought Evolution back up.

Next I clicked on each folder I had just imported so that all it's meta would be re-created: Apparently the new Evolution 2.24 uses SQlite for folders metadata now. This might explain something, at least in part: The new Evolution 2.24 is fast. Way fast. Unbelievably fast. This is the most dramatic improvement in performance I have ever seen in any upgrade of Evolution, going *way* back to the early days.

One week of being up on Ubuntu 8.10 beta as my main, most production like system: No crashes of any kind. No OS, no Evolution. Nothing. Just clean and green.

FWIW: I still have OpenSUSE 11 on my IBM T41. Its too nifty not to have around someplace.

Its Even Better Than That Though

I would have been happy just having Evolution stable. Add in how fast it is, and I am really happy. But wait, there is *more*

The new hddtemp / Sensors Gnome toolbar applet is cool. For one thing, the nVidia GPU reports its temperature there now. After frying one of these, I like this a lot. Also I can edit the disk labels (which defaults to the manufacturers mode number now).

Getting the dual screen setup going required a little work, but it wasn't bad. After telling the restricted hardware driver I wanted to use it's recommended hardware drivers, it downloaded and installed them just fine. Going to 'system/administration' I ran the nVidia X server set up, and had my dual screens going in no time... but it would not save the config back to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

I exited the setup, popped up a terminal, and ran 'sudo /usr/bin/nvidia-settings', and now it would save to xorg.conf, no problem.

OpenOffice is / was 2.4.1 on the Beta disk, and while it has been updated, it is still 2.4.1 rather than 3.0. Hopefully this will change soon. I have been running 3.0 on other systems and it is a very nice upgrade (and a whole different post...). Main thing is that the MS Office document compatibility continues to improve, and that is, next to having Evolution working, key to being a Linux desktop user in the MS Windows world.