Thank you Novell!
For a while now, I’ve been wanting to run Linux at work. My reasons are many, but mainly because I want to try an experiment on myself: to not use Windows for a good length of time and see if I can get by. I use my work laptop way more than I do my home computer pretty much because when I get home, I don’t have any spare time. So if I want to conduct this experiment, I’d have to use my laptop to carry it out. The biggest roadblock was that since we run Exchange for email/groupware, I need to be able to access this without fault.
I’d looked into what options existed in the Linux realm, but alas found only Ximian’s Connector for Microsoft Exchange as part of their Evolution email/groupware application. The only catch was that Connector was proprietary and you had to pay for a license to use it. Damn! I was soo close. At that point I gave up the hunt.
Many months later I decide to check into it again, partly because I forgot that I had discovered Evolution before. This time however, I notice that Novell is pimping it as their product. What is this? Low and behold, Novell acquired Ximian and Evolution is now included as part of Novell’s new Linux Desktop product. And a little more digging reveals that they GPL’d Connector! wOOt! I knew that Novell’s venture into the world of Linux would prove fruitful!
I realize that news is a little outdated now, Novell’s press release was dated 5/11/2004, but its news to me! The only thing I want to hammer out is whether I can use Evolution under KDE without pulling in many of the GNOME libs… I think it’d be swell to run a stripped and lightweight install of KDE. I think by default KDE has too much bloat. However, it offers a lot of the GUI integrations that Windows does, with the Linux level of configuration. And remember, I love eye candy!
EDIT: Corrected my super huge grammatical mistake.
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