[Preamble: I'm running Debian; yes (horrors) I'm running "testing" which means the one *after* woody - that or unstable is what most people run on desktops - fact of life. Since I can't get red-carpet to do anything useful for me (yes I know the reasons) I have to install manually.
Kindly, the packaging team at Ximian continue to release .debs which contain the latest build or release (thankfully so - building evolution is the hardest build task I have ever seen). With a bit of extra effort one can craft an apt-get sources.list [*] that will fetch these packages. They are usually newer than are available in Debian unstable which I don't wish to run) and thus I've been happily using Evo 1.2 since mid beta] On to the topic of my message: I've been trying to make the spell check functionality of evolution work for, oh, a year or so now :) I'd like to report my two major stumbling blocks with a view to potentially improving the [new] user experience: 1. Ximian's aspell package depended on something called libltdl0 . I note that as packaged in Debian unstable there is a library called libltdl3 in the dependencies; nowhere is libltdl0 to be found in the standard Debian releases (stable, testing or unstable). I finally found a copy in "experimental" which is VERY difficult to download from. You may want to look into this as it made installing aspell very tricky. Oh - I found out about aspell from this mailing list... which leads me to: 2. gnome-spell I missed the "Suggests" dependency on gnome-spell in evolution's package, so never installed it, and wondered why the spell checker in evolution was disabled. [installing via `apt-get install evolution`, as most middling-advanced level Debian users are likely to do, does not install Suggested dependencies] I realize that the gnome-spell checker isn't core to Evolution per se, but I must admit I wonder at why one would want to use such a high powered mail client *without* having a spell checker available. Upping the dependency to "Depends" would be strong medicine, but on the other hand evolution all ready depends on almost every library there is... :) Perhaps a middle ground would be "Recommends" rather than "Suggests" but I really think that "Depends" would be the right thing to do. PGP (the other thing "Suggested") is optional, yes, but a spell checker is core to professional communications and has a rightful place in the install of evolution. -- Installing gnome-spell was the last stumbling block, and tonight I see little red squiggles under words I can't spell. Fantastic. Again, many thanks that Debian packages are available. I'm pleased to report your woody (Debian 3.0) packages are running just fine on sid (Debian 3.1?) Happy New Year to all! Andrew *For Debian users, the relevant sources.list lines I am using: deb http://mirror.pacific.net.au/debian ../project/experimental main deb http://ftp.ximian.com/pub/debian woody main -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia +61 4 1079 6725 North America +1 646 270 5376 [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ evolution maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/evolution