I am pleased to report that the 9.10 release of Ubuntu is available for Beta testing. I have had the Alpha running on a test machine for several weeks now with daily updates applied. My First impressions of the release are pleasing, but I haven’t done too much with it yet. The first thing you’ll notice when starting your new 9.10 machine is that the new kernel now seems to have some major video improvements. The screen resolution is automatically detected on my test machine, and the native resolution is applied even before the splash screen. If you use the virtual terminals (ctrl-alt-f1 through f6), then this is a awsome benefit, as the virtual terminals now run in your monitors native resolution, and switching between them is lightning fast.
The next thing you’ll notice is the new splash screen in 9.10. This new piece of work is nothing short of awsome looking. The default user selection/logon screen is a bit boring though. First, I don’t like the “user picker” style login screens. For an attempting intruder, half the battle of gaining access is done for you, you don’t have to guess the username. It’s also not quite as fancey as the new splash screen we just drooled over. I very much prefered the 9.04 default login screen, perhaps they’ll change it before the final release. A quick glance at System->Administration->Login Screen tells me that they’ve taken away the ability to change the default login screen. This is dissapointing for the reasons I stated above, and for those that like to completely customize their system.
The third observation you’ll have is the default color scheme. The ubuntu team has finally let go of the orange title bars in gnome which have served so well for the last… well… since I started using ubuntu anyway. The have moved to a much darker brown, which is fine with me, I prefer most dark color schemes anyway. This is a very customizeable option anyway, and if you don’t like it, it’s very easy to change under System->Preferences->Appearance. For those that really want to spruce up ubuntu, or any gnome based distribution, have a look at http://www.gnome-look.org/.
For those of us that use ubuntu in a corporate environment which runs Microsoft Exchange 2007, I have some good news, and some bad news. The long awaited, and long sought after, evolution-mapi plugin is installable, and you can create and authenticate to your exchange mailbox with the native mapi library. And the bad news? It (still) doesn’t seem production ready! I have my account configured and was able to use it for a few minutes the first time, but when loading certain messages, evolution crashes (completely disappears from the screen) and you lose anything not saved. Worse yet, when I open evolution now, it crashes (disappears) within 5 to 10 seconds, rendering the app useless until I delete my ~/.evolution folder to delete my configuration. It’s so close, yet so far away!
One thing I don’t understand is why someone hasn’t tackled this evolution to exchange problem using EAS or Exchange Active-Sync. Exchange has a web service that runs, which is designed for mobile applications, and any windows based mobile phone can link seemlessly and download any and all emails, tasks, and calander apppointments. Even Google’s android, and the new Palm Pre can utilize this service to accomplish the same thing opensource users have been asking for years. Exchange mailbox access, from a non microsoft client. I realize that the actual API is probably licensed, and costs money to use, but I know there are some brilliant people out their who can design their own API, open source of course, that sends requests and responses to the EAS service the same way the microsoft licensed API would. It’s not much different than mimicing MAPI the way the new mapi libraries do, you’ll just be mimicing EAS instead. Oh well, maybe one day it will work.
That is about as far as I’ve taken my 9.10 box for a test drive. Only around the block. When the 9.10 final is released, I will be installing it on my production workstation, and reporting on all the goodies that I’ve been waiting to be fixed… Like nvidia support for xrandr, so I can get rid of the deprecated xinerama.
Until Next Time!
re Exchange Active-Sync etc
i think that has already been implemented and has been for a while the big push is for the mapi client so it is effectively (in theory) just like Outlook in how it deals with the exchange server.
Sadly, im just testing 9.10 in the liveCD environment on our lan and even the normal Exchange support isnt working. doesnt like the exchange 2007 server saying it is exchange 5.5! crazy. in entering these details you give the address of the OWA URL and all communication is done via the OWA page. this is what you do on an iPhone or other portable device.
Hi AlexB, Thanks for the comment.
I believe you are confusing the old OMA portion of exchange with the newer Exchange Active-Sync Protocol. Exchange 2003 and 2000 had a portion of their OWA websites that was designed for the older style mobile web browsers. It was essentially a list of links representing the different folders of your mailbox, or a list of emails in your inbox. The original “Evolution Exchange” plugin did simple page scrapes and posts, to accomplish the task of handling your email, and contacts. OMA was completely different, and typically ran side by side with the EAS protocol developed by Microsoft as a method of wireless synchronization with it’s mobile device line of products. In Exchange 2007, Microsoft removed the mobile access version of the OWA web site, probably because newer smart phones can either access the true OWA website, or they are relying on the mobile browser to identify itself as mobile, and the server may then render the page differently. Regardless, whatever the Evolution Exchange plugin is looking for, doesn’t exist any more, so it assumes that it is a version of exchange prior to when it did exist. Hence the Exchange 5.5 error.
To my knowledge, no one in the open source world has attempted to tackle developing an EAS client clone, even though it would probably be just as effective as a MAPI client. Google Sync, the iPhone, and even the Palm Pre have licensed the EAS client software in order to integrate full exchange support with their services, and that’s how they are able to accomplish that task. If someone could write an open source EAS client clone, then the open source world may have another method to access many, many future versions of exchange, as I don’t see their active sync service going away any time soon. Whether they can accomplish that goal before MAPI is stable for use is the million dollar question, but having multiple exchange access methods could be most beneficial anyway. Besides, EAS is already designed to be accessed over the public internet, and is encrypted by certificate, so it would be much more portable than a regular MAPI client.
Thanks for reading!