Beauty: Evolution needs to Evolve to make her happy

We’ve hit our first stumbling block.

Evolution, it the form shipped with the Zonbu, does not include the signature of the respondent (at the top) when you reply to a message. Oddly, while it top posts the text, the signature is at the very bottom of the message chain.

Say what you will about top posting, the reality is that Outlook puts it at the top with the message. For better or worse, that is what people generally expect when they are average windows users.

Someone has finally written a patch for Evolution that gives you the option of turning on this feature (which apparently makes certain geek skin crawl). I, like many others, welcome the feature. Without it, it would literally stop me from switching away from Outlook.  And by the way, my signature starts with two -‘s and I’ve been using e-mail since the Vax.  Never forget that being right, and doing the right thing, are often not the same.

Here is some background on the fix:

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Beauty & The Geek Part II: XP to Zonbu laptop, moving the data

As promised, I took a few hours this afternoon and migrated my wife from her XP/Acer Celeron laptop to the Zonbu laptop. This post is all about how to move the critical user data from XP over to the Zonbu OS Linux desktop.

It was not quite as easy as I would have liked, but it was still relatively quick and painless.

The Zonbu website, under applications, makes the following claim:

Full-featured Email and Calendar program — recommended by About.com, “Evolution looks and feels like Outlook, and it has great email features.” Get up and running in moments with the Zonbu data import/export wizard, and transfer all your email history from Outlook or Outlook Express.

I was never able to find such an Import wizard.

Searching the online documentation yielded no reference to import and/or Outlook. I ended up falling back to Google. As Outlook (for e-mail and contacts) is the principal thing my wife was using, other than her web browser, it ws especially important that all of her Outlook content (some 175M) was moved over.

So how did things go?

Beauty & the Geek – The experiment has evolved…

For the next chapter in our story, I’m going to take the Zonbu laptop and pass it along to my beautiful wife.

She currently has a Windows XP system on a 2.5 year old Celeron 1.4 GHz Acer laptop. This Acer was her first personal computer. She’s been a PC user for some time, but always used mine at home and had one at the office so the Zonbu will be the second machine that has been hers to customize.

Tip: Zonbu Keyboard Shortcuts

A recent post in the Zonbu support forms brought to light the extensive keyboard shortcuts available to us as Zonbu users:

Most of the shortcuts are either Windows or XFCE shortcuts. If neither of these work, the shortcut probably does not exist. Here, the XFCE default shortcut Ctrl-Alt-D does what you want.

The offical list is here: http://www.xfce.org/documentation/4.2/manuals/xfwm4#keyboard_shortcuts but we have several customizations.

You can review and edit system keyboard shortcuts in Control Panel > Advanced > Keyboard > Shortcuts — assuming you know how you would create the effect of the shortcut in command line… which is why it’s hidden in the advanced control panels…

I wanted to pass it along for anyone who missed it.

Thanks Aymeric.

-Mr. Zonbu