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(Sort of – anyway)
One of the biggest PITAs of the last few months was SAS upgrading to Exchange 2007. Whilst the Microsoft fan-boys reveled in the increased emasculation of their UI, us Ubuntu users had to revert to OWA – as the Exchange connector in Evolution only supported up to 2003.
With the release of Jaunty Jackalope 9.04 and the associated 2.26.01 of Evolution, there was hope in the air.
The first thing that you’ll need to do is to install the MAPI connector. (If your Exchangebox isn’t running MAPI, then you’re buggered);
sudo apt-get install evolution-mapi
Next, you’ll need to either edit your old Evolution profile or create a new one. On the drop-down list of sources, you’ll see the new Evolution MAPI connector listed.
The first bug that you’ll encounter is that using the FQDN in the server entry will generally cause Evolution to bomb when you click the “Authenticate” button. To remedy this, use the IP address – open a terminal window and ping the FQDN of you don’t know what it is.
The authentication should work now and you will enter Evolution and wait whilst it builds your mailbox for the first time.
This is where the second, and in my case show-stopping, bug appears. The process of building the mailbox for the first time uses a vast amount of memory. My laptop has 2gig of RAM, and that is eaten up and a page-fault (80000405) occurs before the mailbox is built – with Evolution then crashing.
Assuming that your Exchange 2007 install isn’t as big as ours and/or you have more installed RAM than I do, you should get through this point and be up and running.
As a side note, I used swappiness to try and force the OS to page rather than chew up the RAM by typing
sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=100
in a terminal window. This had no effect atall, so I’m guessing that someone, somewhere has been a little short sighted in the way that they have implemented this aspect of the Evolution set up.
Your mileage may vary! So please let me know how you get on.
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Wow, the Bluebells are good this year; For reasons known only to themselves, they’re thick and heady with a beautiful perfume. Walking Shelby in the woods each morning, I can smell the flowers from a hundred yards away.
Perhaps it’s something to do with the cold nights and hot, sunny days that we’re having at the moment – the dew starts to rise just before six in the morning, the sky is clear and the fragrance fills the air.
This time of the year, the Chilterns are a magical place. Despite the fact that it’s forecast to hiss down this weekend, I’m going to take Shelby on a mission on Saturday – whilst Jules battles the plebs in Tesco and Jenny goes to a birthday party. I’ll take the camera with me (if it’s not too tropical)
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One of the reasons I’ve been busy, was preparing for and attending the SAS World Wide IT conference in Cary this April. I went out early to spend a few days with Dad – who drove down from Canada. The flight out was pretty uneventful, apart from being seated with a bunch of rugby players attending a tournament at Duke the following weekend, and I’m happy to say that we all stayed at the Embassy Suites this time – rather than the much flashier Umstead.
Sunday was golf at Prestonwood and, this time, we played the Fairways course. Apparently, this is meant to be easier than the Highlands course we played last year but, for someone of my technical ability (read, none whatsoever) the course proved to be rather challenging. The “no more than ten shots counted per hole” rule was called into play a few times, I lost six balls (found two), nearly caused an RTA with a wayward golf-ball and managed to hit someone’s house. One the bright side, I wasn’t overly troubled by the numerous bunkers – beacause I either didn’t manage to reach them or avoided the fairway all together.
Monday was a wander round the Umstead State Park. How on earth I have managed to avoid this all these years I really don’t know. It’s an absolutely beautiful place – pretty deserted, great trails and wonderful scenery. Including the walk to and from the park, we managed to clock up just under twenty miles – which is, apparently, Dad’s total walking for three years.
Shopping next – to keep the folks at home happy and then into the conference.
Flight back on Friday was a bit of an event. Take off was about six-ish in the evening and due to land about the same time in the morning at Heathrow. All well and good you may say. However, about forty or so minutes into the flight I detected a definite decrease in aircraft noise. The captain came on the tannoy with;
“Ladies and gentlemen. Please don’t panic, but I have an important announcement to make.” (Cue screaming and wailing from some folks.)
“We have lost power to one of our engines and, because of this, are unable to attempt to cross the Atlantic.” (More hysteria)
“We are currently carrying too much fuel to attempt an emergency landing, so will circle on full flaps until we have burnt enough fuel to do so.” (Sobbing and tearing of hair)
After an hour and a half, we had lost sufficient weight to make the emergency landing at Boston airport – along with a cavalcade of fire trucks alongside and behind us. Everything in the airport was closed, so we were penned into the departure lounge until 01:30, when they managed to find a plane with two functioning engines so that we could resume our journey.
We eventually arrived in Heathrow (with the captain announcing “Thank you for flying American Airlines. The airline that gets you there.”) At just before one in the afternoon. Great trip!
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I’m typing this into Firefox on Ubuntu 9.04 – codenamed Jaunty Jackalope.
“How so?” You may ask. “It’s not released until tomorrow.”
Well, to be truthful, I’m typing this into Firefox on Ubuntu 9.04 RC (release candidate). The beauty of Ubuntu over Windows (one of the beauties) is that, in Windows, the release candidate is usually as flaky as hell and your mileage may well and truly vary. With Ubuntu, the opposite is generally true and bearing in mind that the servers will be overloaded tomorrow with folks downloading the production version, I’ve done my usual trick of installing the RC.
For those that don’t know how, simply take the following steps ;
- System -> Administration -> Software Source -> Third Party Software
- Uncheck all entries here
- ALT-F2
- update-manager -d
- Check
- Install update
and that’s it.
So far, so good. On this laptop (Dell XPX M1330) I needed to enable the Pulse audio server to get the sound working.
On the PC at home (Sony VAIO) everything went fine and dandy.
The boot time is absolutely blistering – bearing in mind Ubuntu p***es all over Windows boot times anyway, and I’m just wading through the various features now.
The only thing I haven’t done yet is to enable ext4 – as there are still a couple of bugs to iron out before tomorrow, and I don’t want to hose my file system.
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… it’s been a long time again hasn’t it. Sorry – I’ve been totally snowed under at home and work, so not had a chance to put fingers to keyboard.
As a bonus for you, here are a bunch of posts in one day …….
