I have been standing a few (probably too many actually) hours trying to
find a good PIM package for Linux.
I recently changed jobs/projects and felt the need of having a
well-organized calendar, todo list, etc. My only real requirement was
that I could synchronize this information with my Palm Pilot. Timezone
support would be cool too.
I learnt a lot of things from that: now I know why Gnome can be useful,
and I also realized that in that area Linux is far behind Windows.
For a long time, I couldn't see what people where getting out of Gnome,
except a nice menu. I never wanted to install it because I didn't need
any of the Gnome applications, so the Gnome panel was just a heavy way
to launch programs to me.
When I started looking for a calendar application, an address book, I
finally discovered that Gnome was a whole suite of applications
interacting with each other. Well, I actually kind of knew that already
but never needed any of them. The problem is that you apparently cannot
have the set of applications without the panel that I don't want... This
is not the case with KDE.
I found different solutions:
Gnome[0] based: Gnomecal + Gnomecard + Gnome-Pilot
- Gnomecard[1] is pretty cool.
- Gnomecal[1] is not bad either, but there is no support for the
timezones.
- Gnome-Pilot[2] enables syncing with those two applications, backup,
etc.
The problem is that in order to run Gnome-Pilot, you need Gnome-Panel,
even if the Helix packages do not mention this dependency. So it is
kind of heavy for an address book and a calendar. Moreover, I failed
to synchronize my Pilot database with Gnomecal.
KDE[3] based: KOrganizer + Abbrowser + KPilot
- KOrganizer[4] is ok, but doesn't look as cool as Gnomecal.
- Abbrowser[5] isn't as good as Gnomecard either.
- KPilot[6] is supposed to allow synchronization with those two
applications, but I didn't try it.
With the KDE solution, you just need the KDE libs, and not the KDE
desktop, which is nice. However, I liked the Gnome solution better.
KOrganizer asks about the timezone you are in, but it is not possible
to specify the timezone of the events...
There is also an X11 application, Plan[7], which supports todo's and
events. And there are scripts to synchronize with the Pilot datebook,
but it doesn't support timezones either, and I would be forced to use
another solution for the address book.
Therefore I decided to stay with my current setup: JPilot[8] is limited
(the interface could be better, the calendar suffer from the limitations
of the Palm ones, e.g. no timezone support), but it works and it's
lightweight.
I also was looking for some kind of log book too, and found out that
Emacs's changelog mode[9] (C-x 4 a in Emacs) works pretty well for me.
So the result of this is that Linux is missing a few good PIM
applications. I guess that the Gnome ones will eventually be a good
solution, but you have to be ready to switch to Gnome for more or less
everything. Maybe KOrganizer will get better, too.
But for right now, I think that Windows is far ahead of Linux. For
example, just the standard Palm Desktop you get with the Palm is pretty
good.
0.
http://www.gnome.org/
1.
http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/gnome-pim.shtml
2.
http://www.gnome.org/gnome-pilot/
3.
http://www.kde.org/
4.
http://devel-home.kde.org/~korganiz/
5.
http://apps.kde.com/infofr.php?id=548
6.
http://www.slac.com/pilone/kpilot_home/
7.
http://me.in-berlin.de/~bitrot/plan.html
8.
http://www.jpilot.com/
9.
http://www.gnu.org/manual/emacs/html_node/emacs_264.html
--
Hugo Haas <
[email protected]> -
http://larve.net/people/hugo/
No Kitty that's a bad Kitty!