GNOME on the Road; Rolling out the Red Carpet

By: Michael Hall
Monday, November 20, 2000 09:10:44 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/2665/1/

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There's always a moment's hesitation when you try out favorite tools in a new environment, and dragging a fairly new laptop off to COMDEX this past week was no exception. As it turned out, though, GNOME provided the perfect environment for everything I needed to do to keep caught up between walks around the convention floor. More on that in a bit.

Thanks to Helix Code, GNOME had a large presence at the Linux Business Expo. The Helix Code booth had frequent demonstrations of Evolution and Red Carpet: Helix Code's dependency-solving package installer.

Red Carpet is slated for release in January, and it offers a subscription-based tool for keeping track of software, installing new packages, and making sure all dependencies between packages are met. In addition, Red Carpet will offer the opportunity to undo operations on packages, meaning if you accidentally remove a whole slew of packages as the result of one of those occasional nightmare dependency chains, it will be fairly easy to get them all back and put things back to normal.

According to some Helix Code folks I spoke to during a demo, Red Carpet will also, as with the Helix Code GNOME Updater, take advantage of Helix Code's Akamai-based distribution, meaning downloads will be fast.

The thing I most walked away with from the Helix Code booth, though, is a sense of enthusiasm. There's an active community of developers within the company who clearly enjoy the work they're doing. The impromptu tour I got of Evolution from several of Helix Code's hackers was informative, and enough to make me decide to defer that promised look until I can build it from CVS: there are some features (including some exceptional stuff in the calendar) that are present in CVS that the latest preview doesn't offer. It will be worth the wait.

The Mobile GNOME: Pictures, Appointments, Mail, Connections, and Contacts

Since the bulk of my week was spent at COMDEX, the big priority was switching from my ordinary desktop use to managing everything I needed to deal with from my laptop. Between getting pictures from the convention floor, keeping the appointments I was handling on my Handspring Visor straight with my laptop, managing my e-mail, and keeping Internet connections easy to work with, had a lot to do and GNOME had something for everything I was dealing with.

The challenge with working from a new laptop lies in coming up with tools that will work with a minimum of fuss on short notice, and without the luxury of time that comes with being able to tinker with things from the comfort of your own home. The list of software I was sure to have on hand included:

• gphoto - GNOME's digital camera software
• the GIMP - the ever-popular graphics manipulation app
• gnome-pilot - GNOME's pilot management software
• gnome-pim - the GNOME calendar and address book
• Pronto - a graphical, perl-based mail client with outstanding filtering

In addition, the GNOME "Modem Lights" applet came in handy to provide a flexible front end to the dialup scripts on my machine. "Modem Lights" is nice because it doesn't do anything but run startup and shutdown scripts for your PPP connection, so there's no duplication of effort. It fits into a panel of any size and stays out of the way. In my case, since the Progeny Debian distribution I have installed on my laptop uses wvdial, I just added "wvdial" to the "Connect command" property, and "killall wvdial" to the "Disconnect command" property.

GNOME also comes with an applet called "Battery Charge Monitor" that sits in the panel and tracks the amount of juice you have left in your laptop.

gnome-pilot and gnome-pim

For a writer, COMDEX is all about making appointments. In the week leading up to the convention, I was syncing my Visor on an hourly basis to make sure everything was up to date as appointments, corrections, and cancellations came and went. Just before going out the door to the airport, I synced up one last time and copied the calendar in ~/.gnome/user-cal.vcf over to my laptop.

The gnome-pilot package is an excellent for managing a PalmOS-based device, making sure the device is backed up, and working with the GNOME calendar and address book. It provides a painless interface to the device requiring little more than knowledge of which serial port the cradle is connected to.

Helix Code has packaged gnome-pilot and the necessary support files, to use gnome-pilot you need:

• gnome-pilot
• pilot-link
• gnome-pilot-conduits
• libgnome-pilot0

The most important setting for gnome-pilot is the port. During the Debian setup of pilot-link (the underlying mechanism for making the Palm talk to the computer correctly), you're asked which port your cradle is attached to and a symbolic link is set from that port to /dev/pilot. Otherwise, you should either set the symbolic link yourself or just remember which port your Palm is attached to, keeping in mind, as usual, that serial ports in Linux are a little different from what DOS/Windows users may be used to:

Serial Port Name
Windows	Linux
COM 1	/dev/ttyS0
COM 2	/dev/ttyS1
COM 3	/dev/ttyS2
COM 4	/dev/ttyS3

The next step of the Druid is also important since it sets the userid for the information coming off the Palm. If you've used your device with a computer before, the Druid will pull the information off the Palm, otherwise it will set your name and userid on the device. It's important to get this right because the GNOME calendar displays only information for your userid. It's possible to edit the calendar file by hand if your userid gets messed up, or if you move your information over to a machine where your user number is different, but that's a hassle... best to let the Druid handle this correctly the first time.

Once you've finished with the Druid, right clicking on the Pilot logo on your panel and selecting 'Restart daemon' will put the daemon into listening mode.

You can configure GNOME Pilot from the GNOME control center. It's especially important to note the settings there, since they determine how data is synchronized. The first time around, you may want to set the calendar and address book conduits to copy from the Palm to the target apps if you've never used them before. Once the initial sync is done, you should go back and set these conduits to "synchronize" so your data is kept up correctly with each sync operation. You can find the settings for the Palm on the top menu bar of the desktop by selecting Settings/Peripherals/Pilot Conduits.

You can get at your information after a successful sync with the GNOME Calendar (gnomecal) and GNOME Address Book (gnomecard) programs. Both can be found under Programs/Applications in the Helix Code menu bar.

Handling Graphics and Mail

The next thing I had to deal with was getting pictures from the convention floor to my laptop for upload. I have a Canon S10 Powershot, which is supported by gphoto, the GNOME digital camera management software. You can find gphoto under Programs/Graphics in the menu bar.

gPhoto is very easy to set up: just visit the "Configure" menu, and select "Select Port-Camera Model." There's a drop-down menu of all the cameras supported. If you don't see yours listed, fire up a browser and check Google by searching for the name of your camera and gphoto: a lot of models have the same basic software under the hood. There are also buttons for each port your camera could be connected to. Check the table I provided if you're unsure of which one your camera is connected to.

Also under the "Configure" menu is the "Configure Camera" item. This allows you to set the transfer speed the camera works at. It's ok to set this for the highest value allowed (115,200) but you may experience some timeouts from time to time that mess up the transfers. On my desktop machine, this is never a problem. Some quirk in my laptop, however, forced me to set the speed at 38,400 to ensure smooth downloads.

gPhoto allows users to download an index of thumbnail images to preview before downloading the whole image. The index can be generated by selecting Camera/Download Index. Clicking once on the thumbnail of each image you want to download selects them, and clicking on Camera/Download Selected/Images offers the choice of either opening the images in a window under gPhoto or downloading them directly to your hard drive. gPhoto provides a suite of basic manipulation tools if you don't plan to do much with your photos.

gPhoto is pretty handy, and it's getting better. Though I used a plain serial connection on my trip, the version of gPhoto in CVS has USB support for my model, which will certainly make the process of grabbing photos much faster.

Dealing With Mail

At home, I have a fairly entrenched mail system built around fetchmail, procmail, and mutt. I decided to give Pronto a spin for mail for my trip because it has pretty easily configured filters and multiple POP3 accounts. I also knew that at the end of my trip, it would be a simple matter to export all my mail out of Pronto and into a single mbox file I could refilter through procmail.

Pronto shares a common background with CSCMail, which is in the process of moving toward being built around C instead of Perl. Users of one will be instantly familiar with the other.

One of the nice things about Pronto is that it has a fairly clever installation script that utilizes wget. It checks your system for the required Perl modules, and if you don't have them it fetches them and builds them on the spot. You can get the Pronto installer from the project www.muhri.net/pronto">download page.

As I noted earlier, Pronto's big strength is filtering. It handles this on a level we don't often see with other mail clients, with support for the normal globbing characters many are used to, or full Perl regular expressions for people looking for fine control. It also features virtual folders, which allow you to search for keywords or expressions and "can" the search into a folder for easy access without having to move mail around between them. This is great for keeping tabs on certain authors across mailing lists or providing useful subcategories without splitting your mail too finely.

Pronto also supports mail "personalities," making it easy to maintain discrete mail accounts with the attendant reply-to's, signatures, and the like; and it remembers the people you respond to, adding them to its built-in address book.

If Pronto has a drawback, it's the speed at which the program operates without a specialized setup. It stores mail in a CSV file, but also allows users to store their mail in MySQL and Postgresql databases for faster access. If you have the inclination and patience to do this, and you're serious about using Pronto to its fullest, take the time to set up a database. I compared notes with another Pronto user at COMDEX, and he told me the difference in speed is remarkable. If you aren't the type to hold on to a ton of mail, it isn't as much of an issue: Pronto was comfortable during the length of my stay at COMDEX, but I wouldn't want to use it without a real database backend on the archives I have at home.

All told, though, Pronto was a nice piece of software. People who are waiting around for a GUI mail client under GNOME they can feel at home with should give it a look. Though I doubt I'll be switching mail clients until Evolution is a little further along, Pronto is the one I'd switch to and it will suit a lot of people who don't feel like sticking with Netscape's GUI client.

Summary

So I had a pretty successful week at COMDEX with my collection of GNOME tools. The only part of the environment I didn't try out was either of the text editors--gedit or gnotepad. Both are fine, but I have a dependency on Emacs (or its tiny clone jed) I won't try to kick anytime soon.

GNOME made it easy to get everything I needed to get done, done with quick setup and easy use.

One area I'm still waiting on, though, is stable USB support:

While the gnome-pilot setup has an option for Visor USB connections, I couldn't get this to work despite Progeny Linux's use of a USB-enabled 2.2.18pre15 kernel and the fact I could get coldsync, another Palm syncing app for Linux, to work. I ended up resorting to a serial cradle I'd packed along. Nor does gPhoto's current commonly released version support USB devices like my camera.

Once USB support is better, GNOME will be the perfect laptop environment.