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A Personal Information Management (PIM) suite is supposedly a single application that gives you your email, contacts, calendar and other important information. Bringing Mail, Contacts, Calendar and more into one application is something that many find useful.

On the Linux and Unix platforms there are two main competitors in this space - Evolution 2.24.2, for the GNOME desktop and KDE's Kontact 4.1.3. I'm going to take a look at both programs, side-by-side and compare them.

Regardless of which desktop environment these applications are designed for (Evolution for GNOME and Kontact for KDE), which application is, for lack of a better word, 'better'?

In this two part series, I'm going to look at each app and focus on the interface, email (particularly searching and organising), calendaring (with a focus on sharing), and integration (both within the suites themselves and with the desktop outside of them).

First, to GNOME's Evolution.

Evolution

Interface

If you've ever used Microsoft Outlook before, the Evolution interface is perhaps more than just reminiscent. Throughout, Evolution heavily emulates the way Outlook operates, meaning that Outlook users should quickly find their feet in the client.

It feels well laid out; a sidebar to the left shows you your mailbox list in Mail, calendar list in Calendar etc. and to the bottom of the sidebar you can switch between the components - to go from Mail to Contacts for example. The right hand area is dedicated to whatever you're actually doing - the message list, for example, in Mail.

Email

Evolution has some powerful email search functionality. You can use the Search Box in the toolbar to search for a message, however this only searches the Subject and Sender of the message. Fine for many tasks, but not always enough.

There is also an Advanced Search feature available on the menu, however, that offers full text searching of messages. I found it to be powerful and fairly fast, even in a mailbox with tens of thousands of individual messages.

Finding that one message you're looking for quickly is an important feature of a mail client. Evolution largely gets this right. It could be easier to do a full text search, but provided you know where to look, you won't lose something for long.

Calendaring and Sharing

The Calendar module works well, again, being extremely similar to that of its Microsoft Office counterpart.

I had problems using the Google Calendar CalDAV support with Evolution. I think the fact that the username contained an '@' character was causing issues, so I was a little disappointed not to have that functionality. Importing an .ics iCalendar file worked fine, however.

Sharing events by attaching them as an .ics file to an email is quickly and easily done through the context menu. This worked well and I was able to share an event with myself on another calendar system. When you share an invite in this way, however, you rather curiously can't edit the message body - meaning you have to send a blank message. Rather irritating.

Integration

The integration within the components of Evolution itself is good. You can, as I mentioned, send a Calendar event directly via email, but also you can do things like highlight a snippet of text in an email and make a Task directly from the context menu. Little touches like that make Evolution a well integrated suite of PIM functionality.

Evolution also has very strong links with the GNOME desktop and other GNOME applications. For example, you can access your calendar events directly from the GNOME date/time widget in the panel and it supports syncing with your Pidgin IM contacts.

You also get a nice mail notification on receiving a new message that fits right in with the rest of the GNOME interface, appearing as a bubble in the notification area of the panel.

To Be Continued...

Join me in Part 2 tomorrow for my thoughts on Kontact in these areas and which application, in my opinion, is the best PIM on this platform.

Part 2 now published

Oh and by the way - a very Happy New Year from all at FOSSwire.com (yes, we're a little late to it)!

When you think about desktop environments on Linux/Unix, you'll probably immediately think of the two most popular fully-featured desktop environments - GNOME and KDE.

But using a fully integrated desktop environment is only one of your options. Rather than using an integrated suite of programs, you can simply use a standalone window manager and then just run any of the apps you want.

Fluxbox is such a window manager for the X Window System. Fluxbox provides you with window management, a taskbar-like window switcher and a basic panel, a right-click menu for launching applications. It is lightweight and very configurable.

Many Linux users who are relatively new, but have a fair amount of experience with GNOME or KDE or a similar environment may be curious as to the other options available for running a graphical Linux machine. This post is aimed towards that category of user.

For the purposes of this post and the screenshost, I thought I would try out the newly released version of Linux Mint Fluxbox Community Edition.

In this post, I'm going to look at just some of the key differences between Fluxbox and using a traditional desktop environment (DE) like GNOME or KDE. Some of these differences will translate to advantages, some disadvantages.

We are literally just scratching the surface here, however. Fluxbox is a very powerful environment if you spend some time getting it to work the way you want and adapting to the differences in some key concepts that you might be used to.

#1 - No Pre-bundled Applications

As I've already mentioned, Fluxbox isn't a whole system suite. It does a few jobs, like window management, offering application launching etc. and just that. This means that unlike GNOME or KDE, it doesn't prescribe or recommend you use certain pre-bundled applications.

In GNOME, for example, you have a file manager, email client and so on that come as part of the GNOME suite and are designed to work well with GNOME.

That's not to say that you can't run KMail under GNOME if you want, but you will miss out on the visual integration and perhaps some other integration between the applications.

With Fluxbox, there are no such 'recommended' applications and integration is not really the focus. You pick and choose to run whichever program you prefer.

In a sense, because you're not so bothered about integration, perhaps you feel more inclined to pick whichever app suits you best, rather than the one that fits in the best visually.

#2 - Lightweight and Speedy

I don't want to accuse anyone of making bloatware, but an inherent disadvantage of an integrated desktop environment is that they tend to have might higher system requirements and consume more resources.

Fluxbox is designed specifically to do just a very simple task and to keep the resources consumed to a minimum.

Especially on lower powered machines, giving up that tight integration in favour of something lightweight, speedy can literally make the difference between something that is acceptable and incredibly frustrating to use.

#3 - A Different Way of Working

GNOME, KDE and Xfce all subscribe to a fairly traditional user interface, similar to the interface Windows and Mac OS X, involving often a menu bar at the top or the bottom where you can launch applications, a desktop with icons, a system tray area with icons for apps that stay running and so on.

There are other ways of working, though, and you might prefer them after getting used to it.

Fluxbox doesn't have a menu bar or a button you click to open a menu of applications. Instead, you right-click anywhere on the desktop to show a menu of the applications you can start and tasks you can do.

It is conceptual differences like this that set Fluxbox apart. While perhaps strange at first, many people come to prefer the working style of something different.

#4 - Unique Features

Admittedly somewhat tying in to the previous point, but Fluxbox offers some unique features that while, again, may require some retraining and adjustment, but can prove extremely efficient.

For example, Fluxbox includes a feature where you can merge two separate windows into one tabbed window. This might seem like a strange thing to do, but it can help organise your workspace and save screen real estate.

#5 - Control and Customisation

GNOME, to continue it as an example, often tries to make preferences and options simpler for the newcomer by removing options that are infrequently used.

Fluxbox, on the other hand, offers you complete and utter control over it. For example, you can define your own keyboard shortcuts for pretty much anything (including running a command), customise the look with a much greater level of detail, set specific window management settings for specific applications and a lot more.

There is not an awful lot that can't be changed to suit the way you want to work in Fluxbox, whereas there are frequently limits on the number of things that can be tweaked in traditional DEs to make them work just the way you want them to.

Want to Play?

Fluxbox should be available as standard in any Linux operating system's package manager. Once installed, you should be able to try it out without messing up your existing environment if you have one.

Most distributions offer a 'session' button at the login screen, which you can use to select which GUI you want to log in and use for that session. If you want to go back to your original environment, simply log out (Quit on the Fluxbox right-click menu) and click the Session button again on the login screen to go back to your normal choice.

If you haven't already got Linux on the go, or want a live CD environment, previously mentioned Linux Mint Fluxbox Community Edition is a great distribution that ships with Fluxbox by default. Linux Mint isn't particularly designed for lightweight environments and needs 512 MB of RAM, however.

Have fun with Fluxbox!

[speedometer image source]
[Fluxbox 'tabbing' image source]

Encoding video from one format to another isn't generally considered the most fun job in the world.

One of the video encoding tasks we need to do here for FOSSwire video posts is converting recordMyDesktop Ogg Theora video files into Flash format for the inline player (unfortunately, a necessarily evil).

Traditionally, this would mean dropping to the command line and hand-feeding the encoding instructions to a program like ffmpeg or mencoder.

Ubuntu user JeanClaude (also known as siafulinux) has put together a script for GNOME's File Manager (Nautilus) that makes the Theora to FLV encoding process really simple.

The script can be downloaded here and requires GNOME, Zenity and the video encoding tool mencoder to be installed.

Once you've downloaded the script, you simply extract the file, and double-click install in the extracted folder (choose Run if asked). This drops the script into the right folder.

Now, to convert an Ogg Theora video file to Flash, with default settings, you simply do the following.

Browse to the Ogg Theora source video.

Right-click the source video. On the menu, choose Scripts > Ogv to Flv Converter.

Wait while the conversion happens. When it's done, you will have a nice shiny Flash video file, ready for distributing via the web.

It really is an extremely simple and handy way to very quickly convert a video to Flash video and could easily save a lot of time if you're frequently working with video on Linux.

There are, obviously, plenty of situations where you want more control over the conversion settings, but as a quick two-click solution, Ogv to Flv is a win.

Kudos should go to the developer for making this little script not only really easy to use, but also very simple to install.

If you want to see Ogv to Flv Converter in action, watch this YouTube video made by the author.