As we get ready for the 11.1 release, I have been upgrading my machines to 11.1 so that I have the same desktop experience as all the people who will be installing openSUSE 11.1 — either as their first experience with openSUSE or their first experience with Linux in general.

One of the things I do with every new release I try out is to check various mail clients and see how (or if) they’ve improved.

Last time I tried Evolution with Novell’s Groupwise, I was less than happy with its performance and stopped using Evo after a short while.

I set up Evolution in 11.1 with my Groupwise account this time around, and I’ve got to say — so far, it’s really performing well. After the 11.1 dust settles, I hope I’ll have a bit more time to write up some more lengthy comments about Evolution, but if you haven’t tried Evolution in a while take it for a test drive in 11.1.

Want to become an expert on Evolution? (The mail client, that is…) Join the Helping Hands project on Friday, July 18th for “Things You Didn’t Know About Evolution,” which is being presented by the Go-Evo Developer Team.

It’ll be held in the opensuse-gnome IRC channel on Freenode at 14:30 UTC. (That’s 16:30 for those of you in Germany, 10:30 for folks on the East coast of the U.S. like me, and a slightly early 7:30 for folks on the West coast. Click the link for the time in your timezone…)

If you know anyone who’s just started using openSUSE, how about spreading the word? I’m sure lots of openSUSE users would find this session helpful. I might just have to join this one myself, actually… I am sure there’s plenty I don’t know about Evolution.

Also, I know the Helping Hands team is looking for people to present on topics outside of GNOME (so far all the HH activity has been GNOME-specific, but that’s not the long-term goal) so if you’re a KDE fan or YaST guru, step up and share the knowledge.

This week I’m working off an EVDO connection while I wait for Verizon to get FIOS set up in the townhome I’m moving to. (Just moving across town.) Now, a few weeks ago I blogged about setting up EVDO using wvdial on openSUSE 10.3, so I thought I would mention the process for 11.0.

I hadn’t used the EVDO card in a few weeks, so I plugged it in on my big green laptop that I’m running openSUSE 11.0 RC 1 on. Under GNOME, when I plugged in my EVDO card and went to NetworkManager, it had already recognized the card and all I had to do is click “connect.” No need to give any information (I guess the card stores it all?) — just plug it in and go.

This isn’t just “user friendly,” this is significantly easier than using the same card under Mac OS X or Windows. No (extra) software to install (the management software is a PITA on OS X), it just dials up and goes. Beautiful!

It’s unbelievable how far Linux has come since I went to using a Linux desktop full-time in 1999. From “stable but hard to use,” to “stable and easier than other OSes,” in just nine years.

Update: Should point out that NetworkManager works the same way for users with UMTS, so the network goodness is not limited to EVDO. Anyone have a UMTS card that they’d like to lend me next time I’m in Europe? I think I should test this extensively… (and having a convenient network connection while I travel would just be an added bonus…)

Looks like the openSUSE GNOME team had a very successful bug day yesterday. I was chatting with Christopher Hobbs about it while it was going on, and he said he’d write up a Bug Day Guide — which is already up on his blog. Good stuff, if you’re interested in running bug days, he’s got a few good tips for doing so.

Oh, and I fully support this sentiment: “Gobby has considerably sped the process up, my only complaint is that it doesn’t have vi keys.”

All text editors should support vi keybindings, just as nature intended.

Have some free time on Wednesday, around 13:00 UTC? Go help the openSUSE GNOME team squash some bugs!

If you support multiple desktops, which one gets top billing? Kind of like Lennon and McCartney (please tell me that most of my readers are old enough to get the reference…), it doesn’t really matter very much — there’s so much awesome in each one that it’s just not possible to detract from the choices with an arbitrary decision about which one should go first.

There’s a discussion going on in the Factory mailing list about how to arrange the desktop choices when a user installs openSUSE 11.0. Stephan Kulow posted a screenshot of the selector to the list:

Of course, there were the inevitable (but polite!) comments regarding the order of the selection. I do like the suggestion that we replace the radio buttons with checkboxes, so users can choose multiple desktops from this screen.

And then Lukas Ocilka provides the helpful suggestion to arrange the desktop selections in a circle, so as to show no preference whatsoever.

As a sometimes Xfce user, I’d like to see that choice added to the list. Perhaps we should add Xfce and then place the desktops in reverse alphabetical order…

Maybe we could take a cue from Google, and add an “I’m Feeling Lucky” button here. Users who don’t have a strong preference could just take the luck of the draw and have the opportunity to get to know a new desktop environment.

Of course, it really matters very little what order the desktop choices are ordered in — the majority of users are going to pick the desktop that they’re familiar with, and it won’t matter if that choice is placed first, second, or third. The users who have no idea which desktop is which are probably going to pick the desktop that has the most appealing (for them) description — not the desktop that happens to be placed first.

Given that the two projects are working quite well together these days, it shouldn’t really matter much whether KDE or GNOME gets top billing, and not worth spending a lot of cycles on.

There’s a GNOME meeting later today (obviously later, otherwise it’d be pretty silly to mention it…) at 18:00 CET (17:00 GMT / 13:00 EDT) in #opensuse-gnome on Freenode. Fire up those IRC clients and head over to the #opensuse-gnome channel if you’re involved or interested in GNOME on openSUSE. The agenda can be found on the wiki, as always.

The next project meeting is on Wednesday, April 23 at 16:00 GMT, and the next KDE meeting will be held on Wednesday, April 30 at 18:00 UTC.

I got a nice surprise this morning when I woke up — a note in my inbox that Banshee 1.0 alpha is available. Our own Aaron Bockover has a lot to say about the new release over on his blog:

This is the first release that shows off the hard work we’ve done on rewriting the core of Banshee. There were a number of critical flaws in previous releases due primarily to the fact that writing custom data models for the GtkTreeView was not possible until very recently in Gtk#.

We took some much needed time to redesign the database layer of Banshee to be able to deliver powerful model/query/cache level features and provide a framework to build on for years to come.

I decided to ditch the GtkTreeView and it has paid off. On top of this model sits a slick new list view rendered using Cairo. We control 100% of the drawing, so we can take this thing anywhere we want in the future – things you can only dream of with the GtkTreeView. You’ll already notice some nice GUI “bling” when using the view – try reordering columns.

With all of these core architecture changes, what we have now is a truly flexible framework for developing our prized Banshee.

Even though I’ve been a diehard fan of Amarok for some time, I’ve been playing with Banshee on my laptop for some time — and was happy, except that it had a serious glitch in organizing my music. For some reason, the version of Banshee shipped with 10.3 wouldn’t sort tracks in the right order.

I took advantage of the one-click install this morning first thing, and I’m glad to see that little problem has been sorted out nicely. So far, the 1.0 release looks like it’s shaping up nicely. As Aaron points out, 1.0 alpha is not yet at feature parity with previous releases — but they’re working on it.

Speaking of one-click install — all you happy 10.3 users can grab it right away too:

Also note, if you install it with one-click, it will be installed in conjunction with the previous Banshee. It will show up with a different icon under the Multimedia menu in GNOME, or run from the command line as banshee-1.

Big thanks to Aaron and all the rest of the Banshee team!