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Evolution workarounds

Filed under: General — Thomas @ 13:41

2007-06-30
13:41

I'm going to be an Evo bug avoidance master if I keep this up.

Today's annoying Evo problem is "sometimes when you drag and drop mails, something gets stuck and Evo stays in drop mode even though I've released the mouse button."  If you've ever ran into this you'll know what I mean and how annoying it is.

For the others, the biggest annoyance is that, at this point, your mouse and keyboard are useless in X.  There's nothing you can click, close, or resize with your mouse to leave drop mode.  Most of your keystrokes go to evolution, you can't even activate the panel or switch to other tasks.   You can only switch to console and Do Stuff from there.

In the past, I always used to switch to console or log in through ssh, and do something like

DISPLAY=:0.0 evolution --force-shutdown

This is pretty annoying however, because

  • I use drag and drop heavily when I'm sorting my mail
  • so this bug happens more often when I'm sorting my mail
  • but forcing Evolution to quit typically makes it lose all the state for which mails I've moved and where
  • so I have to start over again and remember to expunge regularly

Today, I thought "what would happen if I start another evolution instance ?¨

So that's what I did, from the console, and bam - it Just Fixes It.  It's amazing how such a small change makes me so much less frustrated using Evolution.  Tied for the lead with the Cancel button.

6 Comments »

  1. YES YES YES

    This bug gets me ALL THE TIME for the exact same reason and drives me ABSOLUTELY NUCKING FUTS!

    I think this is actually a GTK bug, in that when the list is updated, GTK forgets it’s holding a screen grab – but I haven’t confirmed that.

    Problem being when using IMAP it’s a while before evolution updates the list.

    Thanks for the tip on opening a second evo instance, as I also had the same problem where it lost state (i was actually using killall)

    The other thing that would help here is the Xorg option so you can use some key combination (I forget the exact combination, I think it involves the number pad) to destroy all screen locks.

    – Trent ‘Lathiat’ Lloyd

    Comment by Trent Lloyd — 2007-06-30 @ 14:50

  2. agh! That was bugging me also, thanks for the tip!!!

    Comment by Marc Fargas — 2007-06-30 @ 15:27

  3. Hi Thomas,

    this looks like the bug I reported and fixed almost a year ago, happening on gtkhtml when using threads. I had this same problem on my application, and it was a bug on gtkhtml, which I reported but didn’t got applied:

    http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=365258
    http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=368233

    When the desktop got frozen, I used to switch to another workspace so it worked again.

    Hope this helps!

    Comment by xavi conde — 2007-06-30 @ 17:09

  4. Easy fix: apt-get install mozilla-thunderbird

    Evolution always was too slow for my tastes.

    Comment by Jeff Schroeder — 2007-06-30 @ 23:06

  5. YES YES YES

    I reported that bug too and marked it as a blocker. They made the next release without fixing it anyway after downgrading it to critical and a promise, “We’ll fix it next time for sure!”

    It’s very frustrating. The search feature of evo are fantastic but these stupid bugs that freeze X11 just hang around.

    Comment by Martin Sevior — 2007-07-01 @ 06:26

  6. If you’re using IMAP its probably this bug:

    http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=351672

    Comment by Gavin Scott — 2007-07-02 @ 19:36

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