Posted on

Debian Testing Follow Up

In one of my last posts I said I upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu to Debian Testing (after tried Fedora 16 for a couple of weeks). It’s been running for almost one week now. I crashed once (when I hooked up the beamer for doing my presentation.) Not the best moment.

However to be fair. It’s much faster, more stable, more usable,… I’ve seen a lot of people complain about Gnome 3. I for one like it. I’ve been a Linux desktop user since somewhere around the year 2000. I’ve tried almost everything. This for me is a good release because it makes my daily routines faster. To be honest I had to install a couple of gnome-shell-extensions but that was why they build the system as it is.

Finally being able to reply to mails coming from Exchange without the need to fire up a vmware image feels really good and off course also improves the experience a lot. (Or starting Davmail first and starting the email client.)

As I also have to do presentations on a regular basis, I do miss a tool that comes close to what keynote can do. However I’ve seen a couple of people doing some nice presentations in the cloud that look much nicer than the Libreoffice presentation but I still need to look at that. Any suggestions are always welcome! (Google Docs also seemed descent) Off course something that would be as good as Keynote would be even better 🙂

Posted on

Finally able to send and receive mails from inside Linux without fuss

After I installed Debian 6 testing I thought “Lets search for exchange support again”. I do this on a regular basis I still have to face Exchange a lot. (unfortunately)

I found evolution-ews (exchange web services). So I tried installing it, no problems.I added a new account using EWS. I put in the link to our exchange server and withint a couple of minutes my mail was synced with my laptop. I can now send receive mails within my Gnome 3 desktop without the need for booting a vmware with Windows and Outlook.

Ok I still don’t see my calendar, but I do see my my mail coming and I can send,reply,attach,… without fuss.

Thanks guys behind Evolution.This will save a lot of time on my end.

Posted on

Upgraded Laptop to Fedora but switched back 2 debian

A couple of weeks Ago I decided to change the distro on my laptop. I was running Ubuntu 10 LTS. I wanted to switch to a newer distro as this was already running a couple of years and it started showing.

I experimented a bit with Debian Stable, Fedora 16, Ubuntu 12, Linux Mint. In the end I chose Fedora 16 as Debian Stable was still Gnome 2, Linux Mint was ok but not really my thing. Ubuntu 12 was not stable. So finally I chose Fedora 16. After some tweaking and patching of VMWare (Linux Kernel 3 and VMWare aren’t really good friends.) I got everything up and running. I was pretty satisfied but gnome crashed now and then when I wanted see all open appz on my desktop.

This weekend I switched again to Debian 6 testing as this is also Gnome 3. I had to do the same stuff as for Fedora but I noticed already that it’s much more stable and it is also much faster than Fedora. Boot is really a difference of +30 seconds.

I already investigated Gnome 3 a bit and I have to say I really like it. It now combines really the things I was missing on Mac with the things I loved on Linux.