Giving up, a little

As you might know, I migrated from using a MacBook Pro laptop as my primary desktop, to eating my own dogfood, as it were, and using Ubuntu Linux as my primary desktop. And, as you might recall, there were a few snags. My address book was a major one.

And, to top it off, I had to make things more complicated last week, because I decided to get a Palm PDA again. (found a great, really cheap E2 on Ebay.)

So there was the saga of migrating my data from Apple’s proprietary address book to Evolution (and of course, dealing with the beast that Evolution is.) And then, I wanted to sync my new Palm. There were several snags:

• A bug in Ubuntu which prevented the “visor” driver from being loaded at startup
• Gnome-pilot/evolution can’t sync more than one calendar category or one addressbook, or one to do list category, even though the palm has multiple categories
• Another bug in Ubuntu which causes sync to crash if there are to do items with no due date
• Jpilot, the alternative has a user interface reminiscent of, but worse than that of the palm desktop

So, basically, there wasn’t a way for me to get a nice, usable sync for my data that was going to work for me.

As I might have mentioned, it was this very thing that stopped me last time (although, admittedly, it was much worse last time – I had to recompile my kernel to get my palm to sync, and I drew the line at that.)  So, I’m not giving up on using Linux as my desktop, but I am giving up on using Linux to hold my calendar, addressbook and to do lists.

I’m going back to using my mac for that – and installing Spanning Sync to sync google calendar with my mac calendar, so I have a calendar I can use on my desktop. Since Evolution is such a bad mail client, I’m going back to Thunderbird. So I still don’t have a good addressbook on Linux – and I certainly don’t have one that is in sync with my Mac.

(Yes, I know, I could install an LDAP server. Yeesh.)

Sigh.