Manni's blog

When I first got on the internet, we had to use huge HP-UX terminals at the universtity's computing center. I used elm as a mail client back then. Finally, they managed to hook up the offices and our personal computers. That was way-back when Windows 3.1 was installed everywhere and you spend your time optimizing autoexec.bat and config.sys.

You had to jump through a couple of hoops to make Windows 3.1 internet-capable and when you finally managed to get it online, you didn't really have much choice regarding client software. It was Netscape for the web and either Netscape or Pegasus Mail for email. I went with Pegasus and was a happy camper for quite some time.

Windows 3.1 was replaced by Windows 95, Windows 95 was replaced by Windows 98 which was quickly replaced by Windows 98SE. Eventually I got Windows 2000. But Pegasus Mail was always my choice.

I don't know what exactly happened, but a couple of weeks ago I must have gotten into a mail-client changing mood. Maybe it was all the hype about Thunderbird. Maybe it was also the wish to someday get away from Windows and into Linux. Or maybe it was the fact that I made more and more use of IMAP and less and less use of POP3. Whatever it was, I have now changed to Thunderbird.

There isn't much that I miss in Thunderbird that was available in Pegasus Mail. To all intents and purposes, I really hate the fixed window layout that you find in Netscape Mail, Mozilla Mail, Outlook, and Thunderbird. The ability of Pegasus Mail to give you MDI windows for your folders and messages is something that I really miss. I also miss the filtering abilities that Pegasus offered. I don't see why I can't share filtering rules across accounts in Thunderbird; that's really annyoing.

But overall, Thunderbird is really the better client for me. It doesn't give me any bogus new-mail alerts, It doesn't offer default tiny columns that don't even accomodate the headings in new folder windows/views. It can copy/move from and to IMAP folders without any major problems.

But best of all: Using Thunderbird and watching its development, you get the feeling that it will become better and better and that you don't have to wait years for an improvement to arrive. Unfortuately, the same it not true for Pegasus. Pegasus Mail is developed by one single person: David Harris. He thinks that open source software is something bad. He thinks that Pegasus eventually needs a PIM. He thinks he ought to spend his time developing yet another HTML-rendering engine.

In effect, I say "Good-bye, Pegasus Mail". We've spent a lot of time together, wrote and read tens of thousands of emails. Watched operating systems come and go. But our time together is over. I just hope you will be open-sourced one fine day.

After all the trouble with Suse, I ordered the Fedora Core 2 CDs from LinuxCdVersand.de.

Installation was quite simple and quite fast. But the problems with the boot-loader seem to be ubiquitious. This time, all I got was "GRUB". I had to change the 'device.map' file to make it work. Why don't the installers know about this?

I liked what I saw after the first boot. Fedora's default desktop is Gnome and I was ok with this for a couple of days. I didn't have to do anything to share my printer over the network or to access the network.

But when I started groping around a bit, I was a bit disappointed. The installer (or whoever is responsible) didn't automagically mount my NTFS partitions. I even had to download a driver. The menues in Gnome and KDE looked kind of strange, at least not how I expected them to look and I found it impossible to change them.

Then it was update time and I tried to let up2date do its work. But I must say that this is one clumsy application that often gives you the impression that it has died or is caught in an infinite loop. When it's busy, the UI won't refresh for minutes. It will also happily tell you that all the updates weigh in with just 0 KB each. A little more accuracy wouldn't hurt here.

More generally, I was surprised that package handling was so badly implemented. After all, Fedora Core is in the Red Hat tradition. Or so I thought. But clicking on a RPM file in Nautilus or Konqueror only yielded "I don't know what to do with this" messages. The "Install and Remove applications" program only knows about what is on the installation CDs. And all it does is show you package groups. You cannot even search for specific packages. When I found that other rpm installation UI thingy, I had a very hard time finding out whether missing dependencies are on the CDs or if I had to download them. Dropping to a terminal and managing stuff with rpm was really much easier.

The configuration GUI programs offered by Fedora are generally a big disappointment. Configuring system sound events in Gnome is a nightmare. Sure, you can choose another sound if you don't like the default. But you cannot disable sounds for a given event. And the default sounds sometimes are a real disgrace. Does that sound like a nice and friendly welcome? Hardly.

Or take the bootloader configuration thing: All you can do is change the default menu entry for grub and adjust the timeout. Hardly something that deserves the name "bootloader configuration".

The worst about my newly installed system, though, was that it behaved in unpredictable ways. I never knew whether I would have net access after the next boot or not, for example.

And why is IPv6 enabled by default? This will only help you to a poor browsing experience.

Fedora Core 2 will not be able to serve as a replacement for Windows for me. I found it too slow, too unpredictable, too akward to customize, and too poorly documented.

I now ordered Mandrake. I'll keep you posted (whether anybody cares or not).