*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

I spent the better part of today trying to get Evolution, the up and coming contact manager/email client for Linux, to work with my Palm as well as test its contact manager skills. Does it work? Almost. Could it be better? Yes. What is Evolution? Ximian Evolution? is the premiere personal and workgroup information management tool for Linux and UNIX-based systems. Ximian Evolution seamlessly combines powerful email, calendar, address book, and task list management in one powerful, fast, and easy to use application. The software can be tightly integrated into corporate networks and works alongside messaging systems such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.

It just won’t work

Although the above paragraph taken from Ximian’s web site makes you belive you are running the best email / groupware client in the world. That is not the case but it is the best thing we have going for us for those of us who use Linux.

I hate it when things do not work as I am sure most of you do as well. My goal today was simple.

1. Get Evolution installed
2. Setup Evolution to work with my Palm.

The good news is that the install went well but what else would you expect from running Debian? The bad part is that getting the Palm to work with Evolution didn’t go so hot. My problem is that I could not get the correct conduit installed so the Gnome-Control-Center would allow me to set it up. After searching Google and other resources I came to the conclusion that it just doesn’t work at this point. There are a lot of people who talk about this actually working, maybe someone using Debian will let us know how they got it to work.

Conclusion

Evolution isn’t ready for prime time just yet. Although Ximian has made some very nice progress and they are headed in the right direction, not being able to easily sync between my Palm is a big disappointment. In Evolutions defense I will say that as an email client it is very robust and offers a lot of solid email features, not to mention the contact management aspect it offers as well. I say let’s give it until the end of the year and see how it has progressed.