Finally my laptop can shut down!

My Sony Vaio S460 has been unable to shut down cleanly with Ubuntu 6.06 or 6.10. Here’s the bug, which seems to affect some small percentage of laptop, desktop and even server users: Bug #43961: Power down after shutdown does not work…

With Feisty Herd 5 installed, it can power off – and hibernate. Finally I don’t have to shut down when battery runs out – or remember to hold down the power switch to really power off!

Ubuntu 7.04’s due out in April – I can’t wait. If ADSL bandwidth wasn’t so expensive ($10 per GB usage!) I would install now as my primary desktop, and do the daily update thing until release. Perhaps I’ll wait for the beta…

Migrating from Evolution to Thunderbird

I was a die-hard Thunderbird user. Back in the Warty or Hoary days I tried Evolution briefly, but it was too buggy for my taste.

However when I installed Edgy on my notebook I decided to try Evolution out for the calendar and todo list – which until that point I had been keeping only on my Nokia 9500 as it was always on me.

Finally I must admit that I’m not using Evo’s calendar or todo list. Depite the promise of syncing my Nokia E61 to Evolution, I’ve given up on that as it always grinds to a halt after only half my contacts have been copied over. After it duplicated those it had copied I gave up on synchronisation.

So… back to Thunderbird. The mail was easy as my two primary mailboxes are IMAP – but getting the Address Book copied over has been painful.

In summary, Evolution only exports to VCard, and Thunderbird only imports from CSV or LDIF.

Despite the promise of this script evol2tbird-addressbook.py, it only extracted the names from Evo, without email addresses, so I tried this method of exporting Evolution’s Address Book to CSV and importing that into Thunderbird:

evolution-addressbook-export --format=csv > contacts.csv

It took some fiddling on the CSV import to get the fields to line up, but it worked – except that none of the contacts have display names now so they look weird in Thunderbird. Somehow the automatic concatenation of first and last names when you are entering a new contact doesn’t work when editing an existing contact…

There is also apparently a two-step process of using KAddressbook (a KDE app) which can import VCard and export LDIF. Perhaps I’ll try this out if editing all the displaynames in Thunderbird proves too painful.

I’ll let Evo’s development catch up for the next year or two and try again…