Solo Technology

[following up on my first Evolution on Windows post from two weeks ago]

Finally had a chance to try installing Evolution for Windows. The installation itself was painless and wrapped in a nice installer. I did introduce a small wrinkle though: My default/boot drive is D:, not the normal C:. So, after I had it installed, it wouldn’t run! I poked around a bit and realized I need to modify two .cmd files that had c:\ hard wired into them.

The first is evolution.cmd and is only one line. Just find the C’s and make ‘em D’s:
"d:\Program Files\Evolution\startx.exe" /b "d:\Program Files\Evolution\step2.cmd"
Just two places to modify.

Second is step2.cmd as you might guess from the first.

@echo off
echo Configuring Path
set EVO_HOME d:\Progra~1\Evolut~1

Just that 3rd line there needed to be adjusted.

Once that was done I had to do battle with the software firewall. Apparently this thing wants to have a lot of ports open. Will look into that later…

It starts and goes through a little setup phase. What’s interesting is that it offered to setup usenet settings… I didn’t recall Evolution having a usenet reader. I stumbled over it, again, while setting up an email account. One of the options there is to set it up as a usenet server account. Will play with that too. (right now it’s been spinning for 10 minutes. Apparently fetching groups list or something? not really sure.)

It appears that it will import from an Outlook .csv. Have to dig up my Outlook CD. Apparently I don’t have that exporter installed.

What don’t I love? Just sitting there, it appears to use over 65MB. If I close Evolution many of the tasks it launches (evolution-alarm-notify, evolution-data-server, etc.) don’t end. So when I start it up again, I get extra processes running. Doh. Maybe I need to crawl through more of the .cmd files and see if there are other settings I haven’t caught yet. Or frankly, maybe I should just uninstall and reinstall to my C: drive so as not to be wrestling with some of that stuff just now…

This might be a great alternative to Outlook. But I have a lot more playing with it before I’m ready to make that sort of switch. I think I’ll reload it to the C: drive to see if that helps, in any way, with the orphaned processes. If it does, I’ll try an import. I have about 6 years of Outlook data that I’d sure hate to lose just to try a new email client!

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