Here are some frequently asked questions about the Evolution groupware suite from Ximian. If you have a question that's not listed, you can contact us at evolve@ximian.com. How can I use Evolution with Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes? If your server uses standard open protocols like IMAP, POP, and SMTP, you can use Evolution with it. You can share addresses with vCards and calendar items with iCal appointments. We hope to have support for the proprietary segments of Exchange and Notes severs eventually, but this will come after Evolution 1.0. Can I use Evolution with KDE? Evolution will work fine in KDE. You will need to install all of the GNOME libraries that it depends on. Also, certain configuration options, such as default fonts and the message editor keybinding behavior, must be changed using the GNOME Control Center application (this will also run from within KDE). How can I remove or rename a folder? Right-click on the folder and select the Delete or Rename items. Why doesn't drag and drop between folders seem to work? The implementation isn't finished, although it's nearly done. In the meantime, right-click on the folders or messages you want to move, and select the Move or Copy options. Can I read mail from a mailbox file created by some other application (e.g. Mutt) without importing mail from it? No, but it's a planned feature. Can Evolution sync with my Palm OS (tm) device? Yes. However, it is not yet stable enough for general release and we do not yet ship Evolution with Palm synchronization enabled default. Until we do, you will need to compile this in yourself. Check the README file for additional information on the requirements. Full compatibility and synchronization for calendar and addressbook applications on Palm devices will be implemented and shipped soon. What is the difference between a virtual folder (vfolder) and a regular folder? A virtual folder is like a saved search: it is a view of your mail. Regular folders actually contain the mail messages. You can have one message be in multiple virtual folders, but only in one regular folder. See the section in the Evolution manual about virtual folders for more information. Can Evolution spell-check messages while I compose them? Yes. The Evolution composer is able to highlight mis-spelled word on the fly as you type them, and also give you suggestions for possible corrections. In order for this to work you need the gnome-spell component, which is not shipped with Ximian GNOME yet. If you are brave enough, you can check out module gnome-spell from the GNOME CVS and compile it yourself. Check out its README file for a list of gnome-spell's requirements for compilation. Note that you don't need to recompile Evolution after installing gnome-spell; it will be picked up automatically. Why can't I see the images that are contained in some HTML mail messages. Evolution currently doesn't support this, but it's a planned feature. It will be an option: many people like to turn off the images because they use up bandwidth and can be used to spy on your email reading habits. Can I change the font that Evolution uses to compose and display mail messages? You have to change the GtkHTML settings for that: in the GNOME Control Center, go to the "HTML Viewer" configuration page, which is under the "Document Handlers" category. How do I import my Outlook .pst files into Evolution? You cannot import these files directly into Evolution because the .pst format is a proprietary format. However, Mozilla Mail on Windows can convert them into the mbox format, which can then be imported by Evolution. To start importing your Outlook mail to Evolution, run Mozilla Mail on Windows and select the FileImport... to begin. Then select that you wish to import Mail from Outlook. Once Mozilla has imported all your mail, reboot your computer into Linux. Mount your Windows partition in Linux and run Evolution to begin importing your mail. Select FileImport File... to start importing. Set the file type to MBox (mbox) and click on Browse to select the mail you want to import. If you are the only user on Windows, the mail files will be stored in /mnt/c/windows/Application Data/Mozilla/Profiles/default/XXXX/Mail/imported.mail/ where /mnt/c/ is your windows partition mount point and XXXX is some collection of numbers and digits ending in .slt. If there is more than one user, the file will be in /mnt/c/windows/Profiles/USERNAME/XXXX/Mail/imported.mail/ where USERNAME is your Windows username. For each mail folder in Outlook, Mozilla will convert the folder into one mbox file. To import all your mail, import all the files without a .msf extension. If Mozilla can import .pst files, why can't Evolution? Mozilla on Windows accesses the .pst files through the MAPI.DLL, which is only avaliable on Windows. MAPI.DLL is the only way to access .pst files and Evolution cannot use this DLL in Linux. Will there be a server? How about a text-based or web-based front end? Of course, we can't comment on unannounced future product plans, but Evolution's architecture would permit the existence of that kind of software. If there is enough demand for such software we will consider moving in that direction. Will Evolution make a good mocha? Only espresso is planned, but you can easily plug in a chocolate component. Where can I get the latest Evolution release? There are two ways to install the latest Evolution release: If you have Ximian GNOME installed, you can start Red Carpet, Ximian's software updating system, and subscribe to the Evolution channel. This will let you install a binary for the latest release, and will also warn you when a new version has been made available. If you want to compile from source, you can download the latest official Evolution tarball from: ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/unstable/sources/evolution Are binary snapshots available? Yes, if you have Ximian GNOME installed. Just run Red Carpet and subscribe to the Evolution Snapshot channel. You can check the status of snapshots at http://primates.ximian.com/~snapshot. Why isn't a new snapshot available today? Sometimes the build might fail because of problems with the source on CVS. In this case, just wait for next day's snapshot. How do I get Evolution from CVS? If you already have GNOME CVS access, simply check out the following modules: evolution, gtkhtml, gal. If you don't have a CVS account, you can use anoncvs instead. Bear in mind that anoncvs is only synchronized once a day, and code received from anoncvs may not be latest version available. Before using the anoncvs server, you have to log into it. This only needs to be done once. Use this command: cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome login Then you can retrieve the modules needed to compile Evolution using the following command: cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome co evolution gtkhtml gal How should I compile Evolution avoiding conflicts with my existing GNOME installation? The best way is to install Evolution into a separate prefix. In order to specify a non-default installation prefix, you can pass the --prefix option to configure or autogen.sh. For example: cd /cvs/evolution ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gnome If you install Evolution and the Evolution libraries in a non-standard prefix, make sure you set the appropriate environment variables in the startup script for Evolution: export PATH=/opt/gnome:$PATH export GNOME_PATH=/opt/gnome:/usr You may also need to add $prefix/lib (e.g. /opt/gnome/lib) to your /etc/ld.so.conf. Of course, this will not work for systems which do not use ld.so.conf, such as HP-UX. I get the error message: make: *** No rule to make target `all-no-@BUILD_INCLUDED_LIBINTL@' You probably have gettext 0.10.36 or later installed. Try downgrading to 0.10.35; unfortunately, 0.10.36 introduced some incompatibilities with the current xml-i18n-tools. I get Cannot initialize the Evolution shell. There are a number of things that can cause this error. Check that: oafd is listed in your PATH environment variable. GNOME_Evolution_Shell.oaf and the other       GNOME_Evolution_*.oaf files are readable and installed in $prefix/share/oaf, where $prefix is one of the prefixes listed in GNOME_PATH or OAF_INFO_PATH.  (These variables are supposed to contain $PATH-like colon-separated lists of paths.  If the installation prefix for Evolution is different from that). Run `oaf-slay' once before running `evolution' again if you change $GNOME_PATH or $OAF_INFO_PATH. evolution, evolution-mail and the other evolution-* executables are in your $PATH. I get Cannot open composer window. This actually means that Evolution cannot activate the HTML editor component from GtkHTML. The comments in the previous answer still apply; also make sure that gnome-gtkhtml-editor is in your PATH. I get Cannot open composer window. This actually means that Evolution cannot activate the HTML editor component from GtkHTML. The comments in the previous answer still apply; also make sure that gnome-gtkhtml-editor is in your PATH. I updated Evolution and now my addressbook information is gone! What should I do? Evolution uses the libdb library to handle the addressbook database. Two versions of libdb can be used with Evolution: version 1.88 and version 2. Unfortunately, an Evolution executable that is linked against a certain version of libdb will only be able to read addressbook files written by another Evolution executable that is linked with the same version of the library. If your addressbook is not readable by Evolution anymore, it probably means that you used to have Evolution linked with a certain version of libdb, but now it gets linked to a different version. Because of the way libdb is designed, it is not easy for Evolution to automatically do the conversion between the two formats. But, if your Evolution used to be linked against version 1.85 and now is linked to version 2, there is a very simple way to convert the database and recover your data. First of all, check the format of the database using the file command: file ~/evolution/local/Contacts/addressbook.db You want version 1.85 there. If your version is 2, then your current Evolution is probably linked against version 1.85 and you cannot convert the database to the old format. To do that, follow these instructions: Quit Evolution. Make a copy of the addressbook database for backup purposes, then move the original out of the way. cd ~/evolution/local/Contacts cp addressbook.db addressbook.db.backup mv addressbook.db addressbook.db.tmp Convert the contacts to the new format using db_dump185 and db_load: db_dump185 addressbook.db.tmp | db_load ~/evolution/local/Contacts/addressbook.db Restart Evolution. Evolution reported an error when trying to retrieve from my local spool in /var/spool/mail/username. Why? Evolution doesn't have an external helper for moving mail, so /var/spool/mail/ must be writable by you. Try this: chmod 1777 /var/spool/mail We're working on a solution to this problem now. Evolution crashes reporting that it couldn't allocate N billion bytes; how do I fix this? This usually happens when a component tries talking a certain version of a CORBA interface to another component that supports a different version. For example, this can happen when you recompile and install a single component without recompiling/installing the rest of Evolution. If you run into this problem, make sure all the components are compiled and installed at the same time. This also applies to GtkHTML upgrades; after upgrading and installing a newer GtkHTML, always re-compile and re-install Evolution against it. What is killev and why do I need to use it? Evolution is actually made up of several components that run as separate processes. Evolution's shell is not very good at cleaning up stale processes, so it is possible that sometimes already-running components cause unexpected and/or broken behavior. It's always a good idea to run killev after a crash in Evolution, especially if the Evolution shell itself crashed. (If a component crashes instead, you should try to exit the shell cleanly first, so you give a chance to the other components to clean things up properly.) What is oaf-slay and why do I need to use it? oaf-slay is an utility which comes with OAF, the Object Activation Framework that is used in the GNOME Desktop to activate components. It will kill the object activation daemon (oafd) as well as all the active components on the system. Using oaf-slay oaf-slay is quite drastic and can cause problems with other programs that use oaf, especially with Nautilus. To avoid problems, do not run oaf-slay while you are in GNOME. Find a bug? Here's how to help us fix it! Where should I report bugs for Evolution? You can use the GNOME Bug Report Tool (bug-buddy), or report bugs to the Ximian bug reporting system (Bugzilla), located at http://bugzilla.ximian.com. Please use the query function to check if a bug has been submitted already, so that we avoid duplicate reports. What is a stack trace (backtrace) and how do I get one? A stack trace is a list of the chain of function calls that lead to some point in the program. Typically, you want to get a stack trace when Evolution crashes or hangs and you want to try to figure out where in the code that happened and why. For this reason, stack traces are extremely useful for the Evolution developers, so it's important that you learn how to get them, and include them in crash reports. The bug-buddy tool can get and submit a stack trace for you. If you want to do it by yourself, here's how: First of all, in order to get a stack trace, your executable (and possibly the libraries) must be compiled with debugging symbols. Debugging symbols are created by default if you compile from CVS, and are included in the snapshot builds. If you decide to compile by yourself with some custom CFLAGS value, make sure -g is included in them. Finally, you must put the component that crashes through gdb, the GNU debugging tool. To do so, make sure all the components are dead (exit Evolution and run killev), then run the following command: gdb name-of-component Where "name-of-component" is the name of the component that crashed. Then, at the gdb prompt, type r (for "run") and wait a few seconds to make sure the component has registered with the name service. Then start Evolution normally from a different terminal. When you have started Evolution, reproduce the crash, and go back to the terminal where you ran gdb. If the component crashed, you should have a prompt there; otherwise, just hit Control+C. At the prompt, type info threads. This will give you a screen that looks like this: (gdb) info threads 8 Thread 6151 (LWP 14908) 0x409778fe in sigsuspend () from /lib/libc.so.6 7 Thread 5126 (LWP 14907) 0x409778fe in sigsuspend () from /lib/libc.so.6 6 Thread 4101 (LWP 1007) 0x409778fe in sigsuspend () from /lib/libc.so.6 5 Thread 3076 (LWP 1006) 0x409778fe in sigsuspend () from /lib/libc.so.6 4 Thread 2051 (LWP 1005) 0x409778fe in sigsuspend () from /lib/libc.so.6 3 Thread 1026 (LWP 1004) 0x409778fe in sigsuspend () from /lib/libc.so.6 2 Thread 2049 (LWP 1003) 0x40a10d90 in poll () from /lib/libc.so.6 1 Thread 1024 (LWP 995) 0x40a10d90 in poll () from /lib/libc.so.6 For the most part, only evolution-mail will have more than one thread. Now, for each of the threads listed, type the following commands: thread N bt Where 'N' is the number of the thread (in this example, 1 through 8). Cut and paste all the output gdb gives you into a text file. You can quit gdb by typing quit If you prefer, you can start gdb while a process is running. You'll want to do this right after a crash dialog appears, but before hitting "OK" or "Submit bug report". Start gdb as above, but instead of using r, type attach PID where PID is the process ID of the component you want to debug. If that sounds too complicated, you can always use bug-buddy to get and submit the stack trace. A component of evolution crashed, but since the rest of evolution stayed up, I couldn't use bug-buddy to get a stack trace. How can I use gdb to get a stack trace of the component? To trace a failing component (in this example, evolution-mail): Open two terminals. In one, type gdb evolution-mail . Replace "evolution-mail" with the name of the component that is crashing: evolution-addresbook, evolution-calendar, etc.) Once gdb starts, type r and hit enter. Give it a few seconds, to make sure it starts up completely. In the second terminal, type evolution. Do whatever you did to cause the crash in the component you used in step two. When the crash occurs, type 'bt' in the first terminal. Cut and paste the output into your bug report.