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 Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions On the Desktop Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Linux History Letters All in one big page See also: last week's On the Desktop page.
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On The DesktopCalendaring: fables and truths.
On the personal level, a desktop user who has no need of sharing of calendar information has a number of options. The grand daddy of all open source calendaring tools is probably ical, a Tcl based application. The interface is reasonably easy to use, if not quite as slick as any GTK+ and Qt based tools. Still, it's very stable, simple to use, and full featured enough to be able to keep tabs of the day to day activities for years on end. It will import other users ical calendars so you can, at a primitive level, share calendars. It also offers simple alarms and event repeat features. The drawback is that ical isn't really supported anymore. In fact, you're lucky if you can find a web site that even carries it. Fortunately, most modern Linux desktop distributions include it with their base packages so you shouldn't have to go looking for it. KOrganizer, on the other hand, is very actively supported, if just a little crude in allowing users to migrate from ical. The KDE based KOrganizer offers much stronger feature set including search and email options. It can import ical data (almost) and color code events. It also offers the ability to attach an attendee list to events, something ical does not, as well as specify status levels for individual events. A minor bug in KOrganizer 2.1 prevented seamless import of our ical data. Fortunately a primitive ical-to-vcal script is provided that will convert old ical calendars to vcal format. This script had to be run manually but it worked. Since the script is primitive, you have to read it to know that you are required to provide the input and output filenames and you must name the output file with a ".vcs" extension or KOrganizer will crash when it merges in (as opposed to imports) the new calendar. Once you get past all this, though, the program works quite well. The display is fairly clean and the individual entries are easy to find. There is potential here, but room for improvement as well. Compared to the primitive ical you'll find a richer feature set, partially as a benefit of being part of the overall KDE environment. For groupware support we needed to talk to an expert in the field of calendaring - David Sifry, ex-Linuxcare honcho and now a leader in the open source calendaring arena. David currently manages two projects, GCTP, the Group Calendaring Transport Protocol that describes a non-proprietary method of scheduling multiple calendars, and OpenFlock, a reference implementation of a GCTP server. Sifry says that users really have multiple options. "First," he says, "you have to start by understanding that there is an ical program and an ical standard. The iCalendar standard is an extensive and complex protocol from the IETF that specifies the format for calendar data and its handling." While ical, the program, uses its own format for saved calendars, most modern calendar programs use the iCalendar standard format and/or the vCal and VCard formats. [Ed. Note: if you're really interested in the technical aspect of this arena, you can check out the IETF's Calendaring and Scheduling Working Group.] "The one open source application that is making the most splash here is Evolution," adds Sifry. "It's quite good for individual calendaring." Sifry says that Evolution is completely iCalendar based. "It works a lot like Outlook in features, but not in security. You can, for example, click and drag along the calendar to specify a set of dates you want to look at. It shows schedules in a sort of Gant chart format so you can look at your day in blocks of time," much like KOrganizer does. According to Sifry, Evolution does include rudimentary group calendaring using a sort of peer-to-peer system. Users send email with encapsulated appointments to other users to inform them of the schedule, says Sifry, "but there is no way of querying a centralized server or database to know if the recipient has read it or they happen to be on vacation or whatever." You can also export calendars as ical objects. "It's a reasonable solution for now if everyone is using Evolution in a small office." Another option which may be even more mature comes in StarOffice. Says Sifry, "StarOffice also has a calendaring tool that can sync to the Pilot. The problem here is that the calendaring feature is going away in OpenOffice, much to the chagrin of users." OpenOffice is the next planned release for StarOffice, with the open source version going under the name OpenOffice and Sun's version going under the name StarOffice 6. Sifry also noted that the commercial versions of StarOffice also have a calendaring server so you could run a small office using just StarOffice. He points out that in StarOffice 5 the server was a little buggy and since it was a licensed tool Sun was wary of carrying it over into the new release. Currently they seem to be looking for alternatives for calendaring in version 6 and for OpenOffice. Sifry says that calendaring isn't a new problem, that it has been around for years. "A number of proprietary solutions have come into existence but are based on their own networks. These can run on Linux, like Domino. You could run a Lotus Notes solution on Linux using a Domino server and Notes clients on any desktop [Windows or Mac, that is]." But Sifry was turned off on proprietary clients for some time, having waited impatiently for Linux clients to become available (no Notes client is yet available for Linux, much to our surprise). "Outlook works great under VMWare," says Sifry, who actually uses it that way currently. "As long as you're not using Outlook for email," he says, laughing, "it's a pretty good program." He also recommends GroupWise from Novell, if you're planning on looking for VMWare based solutions. "Win4Lin can also run Outlook, at least in the Express version." Mobility is less of a problem for Linux users. JPilot, for example, actually has a nice calendar of its own embedded in it. Also, if you have a Palm Pilot, you can use www.palm.com, which offers Web based calendaring. This means that you can log into your palm.com account from your Linux box, make changes and the next time you log in to your wireless Palm the changes will show up. But this isn't really Linux specific, it just happens to be easily accessible from Linux. And, of course, both KDE (kpilot) and GNOME (gnome-pilot) offer Pilot integration with some calendaring. One last project Sifry wanted to plug was ReefKnot. It's a groupware calendaring server, a web based platform for doing calendaring. It's being put together by a group that includes Dan York, former LPI and e-Smith wonderboy. The project is Perl based and includes the Net::Ical module. It allows you to parse and interpret ical objects. Sifry says the project has a strong development group behind it and is worth keeping an eye on. Dell and the Desktop. Dell announced this week their intention to stop shipping Desktop Linux preinstalled on their computer systems. According to Dell representatives, the demand isn't there. Customers who want to buy 50 or more PCs can have them installed with Linux if they go through a custom ordering process that is separate from Dell's online store and catalogs, [company spokesperson Sarah] Lavender says. But not everyone at Dell plays by the same rules. The Australian branch of the Austin, Texas based company sees things a little differently, and it doesn't plan to drop the Linux desktop from its set of preinstalled systems. The Australian office, however, has decided to hold off on plans to remove Linux as an option in the pre-installation stage. Rob Small, corporate communications director at Dell Computer Australia, explained the US move was merely a result of customer demand. Dell will continue to preinstall Linux server systems both in the U.S. and Australia. The company's move to drop U.S. desktop preinstallations comes, not surprisingly, as Microsoft tries to rush its XP shipments out the door ahead of further legal anti-trust action. One wonders if Michael or Bill is actually in charge down in Austin... Desktop EnvironmentsKDE 2.2 Tagged, KDE 3.0 Branch Opened. KDE 2.2 has been tagged in the source tree in preparation for it's final release on August 13th. GNOME release and summaries. The first beta of GNOME 1.4.1 was released this week. For those curious individuals with too little time to investigate on their own, a list of changes from 1.4.0 to 1.4.1 has been posted. Along with the new beta, two new summaries from the GNOME project were posted as well. The GNOME Summary for August 4 covers the upcoming 1.0 releases of AbiWord, Evolution, and Mozilla; the 2.0 library freeze, the GNOME Usability Project, and more. A somewhat delayed GNOME summary for July 22 - July 28 was also released this past week. It covers the API freeze, Martin stepping down as Release Co-ordinator and some interesting development applications. Office ApplicationsAbiWord Weekly News. The 55th edition of AbiWord Weekly News is now online. Updates to the application this past week included language updates, updates for both BeOS and Mac, and fixes for printing images. On a related note, it looks like we may have missed issue 54 last week. Check it out if you missed it too. Sun's rising star enters Microsoft space (computing). Sun's StarOffice is replacing Microsoft's products at the Central Scotland Police facilities, as well as many other high profile locations. "Ian Meakin, product marketing manger at Sun, said the company firmly believes software should be free, which is why it offers users the opportunity to download Star Office free of charge. 'Why have the blue screen of death when you can have Linux on your laptop?' he said." Evolution 1.0 Beta 2 is out!. A new release of the Evolution 1.0 Beta cycle hit the ether earlier this week. As usual, this one carries numerous bug fixes, as all Beta releases tend to. Additionally, Ettore Perazzoli posted a notice titled Evolution Wants You! to the GNOME Hackers mailing list. The Outlook-killer project is aiming for a 1.0 release at the beginning of October but it needs a much wider range of testers if it is to get there on time. Of course, if you can fix bugs too, well that would be even better... Desktop ApplicationsAOL releases new Netscape beta (Yahoo/C|Net). AOL has released a preview release of Netscape 6.1. The new version is said to include mostly configuration option updates with little core code changes though its stability is considered to be significantly improved over 6.0 - there must have been just a few core changes, we're guessing. Netscape 4.x users can grab this version directly from Netscape's download area. Sondra, The Next Level in MP3 Appreciation?. KDE Dot News reports on a new MP3 front end, called, Sondra, which allows you to rank songs in your playlists. "Sondra has a KDE-interface, a command-line interface, and the backend is implemented as a library, so anyone can use it with maximum flexibility." And in other news...Matthias Ettrich On Universal Components. A RealVideo version of Matthias Ettrich's talk on Universal Components at LinuxForum is now available online. The Chopping Block for August. The WorldForge Project has released The Chopping Block for August, its monthly newsletter that, they say, will become truly monthly again. Articles this month include a discussion of artificial intelligence in games, a report from LinuxTag 2001, reports from several WorldForge subprojects, and more. cal3d 0.6. Developed originally for WorldForge and released early this week, cal3D is a 3D character animation engine. Features in this release include progressive meshes for LOD, unified exporter framework, flexible material handling, user-data fields and a much nicer rendering API. Section Editor: Michael J. Hammel |
August 9, 2001
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