What PIM Suite/Email client do you recommend?

[Beerislife]

I'd always been a bit of a distro hopper until I settled on KDE Neon, so Thunderbird has always been my preferred mail client. I have Provider for Google Calendar installed for bi-directional access to my Google Calendar. It requires the Lightning plugin.

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-GB...ogle-calendar/

[Chopstick]

Evolution/Exchange setup

For the benefit of people reading this later, I should also add that while setting up the Google account was completely straight forward and intuitive, setting up the M$ Exchange account was a lengthy and somewhat complicated process.

First you need to install the evolution-ews package from your package manager.
For the setup within Evolution I used this guide (PDF), which has pretty pictures and is very easy to follow:
https://carleton.ca/its/duo/wp-conte...lution-EWS.pdf
This guide assumes that you have a "Tenant ID" and and "App ID"; if you work in a larger company with a competent IT department, they probably already have this set up or they can do it for you. However, if you work in a small company and are one of only a few Linux users, you may have to do it yourself.

Both, the Tenant and App ID's, are from Microsoft's Active Directory on Azure. The Tenant ID is associated with your work group or organization on Azure, while the App ID is basically a suite of permissions associated with a client app for Azure web services (as far as I understand...).
To set this up I found this guide very helpful:
https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evolution/EWS/OAuth2
Some of the GUI elements on Azure Active Directory have changed slightly and I had to use the search function to find the permissions element in section 6.c.iii, but overall it was not too difficult. After you have the Tenant and App ID, you can set up Evolution and at least for me everything works now!

[Chopstick]

Hi Folks,
I thought I should follow up and let everyone know what I decided to to and what my experience so far is.

So, I decided to wipe my drive and install kubuntu 20.04. Overall I am quite happy with this, but I still have some issue. I opted for full disk encryption and a btrfs file system (following GreyGeek's recommendation). Start-up time is not that fast and mounting of the encrypted LUKS partition does not work without manual intervention (with initramfs). More to that in a separate post).

Now to the PIM suite: I installed Evolution and set up my email accounts and calendars. Google accounts was super easy, also with 2-factor authentication and email and calendar work like a charm with full functionality! M$ Exchange was a bit more complicated, because you have to add explicit permissions for Evolution in this M$ Active Directory thing on Azure (which I do not fully understand, but I followed a guide and it worked flawlessly). So, both, Google and M$ Exchange accounts work and have full functionality in Evolution, which is pretty amazing and more than I expected! Needless to say, setting up my university IMAP accounts was a breeze (except SMTP for one, which I don't use anyway).

[woodsmoke]

Chopstick
thanks for the information, I will try that!
woodsmoke

[Chopstick]

I use two-factor authentication with my Google account, but our M$ Office365 system does not use two-factor authentication.
Email from our M$ account works with IMAP in KMail, but nothing else works.

I was also able to get Gmail to work with IMAP *and* two-factor authentication in KMail, and the process should be the same for Evolution, however, that does not work for the calendar, and apparently Google will start blocking Gmail for KMail as well starting in June. (Google apparently considers KMail unsafe.)
The way to get Gmail to work with two-factor authentication is to generate an app password in the web interface of your Google account and then use that instead of your login password. The app password has 16 digits, is random, and by-passes the two-factor authentication. As I said, this currently still works with IMAP and KMail, but does not work with the Google Calendar and KOrganizer.

[woodsmoke]

Hi
If your work is going to go to "two part authentication",. this new stuff is different from what Gmail tried to force on us a few years ago, because of the whole malware thing...

I do not know of any of the e-mail clients that will do SOME of the new "two step" authentication.

HOWEVER, if your business is using MS Cloud e-mail client and does not use two step authentication then MS cloud e-mail is just typing in the particular cloud URL etc. NOT the recommended steps about outgoing, incoming yada...

You WILL need to get the URL etc. security stuff like STARTTLS or START or whatever from your work and it should go fine.

woodsmoke

[Chopstick]

Thanks, that answers my question:

Btrfs works safely with partition encryption (luks/dm-crypt) since Linux 3.2.

[GreyGeek]

https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index...._encryption.3F

[Chopstick]

Thanks for your comprehensive demonstration of your backup process, btw. So far I didn't use anything particularly sophisticated. I used Unison for a while, but recently I actually haven't had a good backup strategy. My home office really needs some work! (Of course my work is always backed up on GitHub, so it just wasn't that critical.)

One question I had about this whole btrfs thing is, how does it interact with full disk encryption? I like to have that on my laptop, in case it gets lost, because I also have confidential business stuff on it. Would that interfere with the incremental backups?
Other than that, I think I am pretty much ready to try it.

I'm now creating a bootable flash drive and will try the 20.04 alpha tomorrow!

[GreyGeek]

Eggsakly!!!

My youngest grandson (14) and I went Bass fishing yesterday at a lake a couple blocks away and he promptly landed a 6-8 lb catfish, and a 12" Bass.

[Snowhog]

I retired in 2008 to become a Bass fishing bum with my grandsons!

So one could say that you retired to "sit on my ass and fish for bass."

[GreyGeek]

Assoc Prof of Physics, Math, Biochemistry and two other fields. I was a professional student. (I miss grad school and its environment of pure investigation and discovery)
I taught for almost 20 years and then started my own computer and criminal forensics business, mostly writing business applications and working on murder investigations. I retired in 2008 to become a Bass fishing bum with my grandsons!

I think you'll find the use of BTRFS very rewarding in terms of backing up and rolling back.
Here is what I usually do, taken from my history command:

sudo -i
mount /dev/disk/by-uuid/ce2b5741-c01e-4b3d-b6ba-401ad7f7fcdf /mnt

(that uses the uuid of my sda1 partition. Use blkid to find your uuid's.

btrfs su snapshot -r /mnt/@ /mnt/snapshots/@20200327
btrfs su snapshot -r /mnt/@home /mnt/snapshots/@home20200327
Those two command create a snapshot pair linked by date. The "-r" parameter makes the snapshot read only.

Notice: ALL of the above can be done without taking your system offline. All apps can continue to run, printers print, etc... The only exception to that is if you do a rollback and reboot.

Sometime in the future I can rollback to the @20200327 and @home20200327 snapshots, making them @ and @home, by using:

mv /mnt/@ /mnt/@old
mv /mnt/@home /mnt/@homeold
btrfs su snapshot /mnt/snapshots/@20200327 /mnt/@
btrfs su snapshot /mnt/snapshots/@home20200327 /mnt/@home

(Notice that the "-r" parameter is not used, making the new @ and @home rw.)
umount /mnt
exit
reboot.


Note that you cannot use mv to move snapshots between btrfs subvolumes on two different storage devices.

After the bootup completes I open a console sudo -i to root, mount /mnt as before, and issue
btrfs su delete -C /mnt/snapshots/@old
sync
btrfs su delete -C /mnt/snapshots/@homeold
sync

Sync enforces the commit. The command fstrim (mainly for SSD's) is set up automatically if systemd detects an SSD during the distro install so you don't have to worry about using that command. Using it too much can shorten the life of an SSD. Systemd uses it about once a month.

The first time I do a backup to a remote device, mounted as /backup, I first send an entire set:
mount /dev/disk/by-uuid/17f4fe91-5cbc-46f6-9577-10aa173ac5f6 /backup (3rd HD on my laptop)
btrfs send /mnt/snapshots/@2020326 | btrfs receive /backup
btrfs send /mnt/snapshots/@home20200326 | btrfs receive /backup
Since my system is about 100Gb it will take about 5-10 minutes to send @2020... and 10-15 to send @home2020....
That pair establishes my base pair.

From now on I just send increments following the making of each snapshot pair.
btrfs send -p /mnt/snapshots/@20200326 /mnt/snapshots/@20200327 | btrfs receive /backup/snapshots
btrfs send -p /mnt/snapshots/@home20200326 /mnt/snapshots/@home20200327 | btrfs receive /backup/snapshots

"-p" is the partial backup parameter. The receive part of the command uses the previously sent 20200326 pair and adds what the send part sends, which is only the difference between the snapshot on the 26th and that of the 27th. This means that it usually, on my system, takes less than a minute to send @2020... and a little more than a minute to send @home2020....

The btrfs send has an "-F" parameter that sends the snapshot as an ASCII stream and it is saved at the receive end into a text file. That is used when the remote system isn't formatted with btrfs. The destination and the source locations can be reversed in the send command to fetch remotely stored snapshots.

I do this manually in a Konsole using history to recover previously used commands. It usually doesn't take more than a couple minutes to make both snapshots. One can use TimeShift as a gui to btrfs but there are two major differences: first, the snapshots are stored within the @ system. Secondly, if you unistall TimeShift without deleted all the snapshots made by it before doing so, your system will be corrupted and you'll have to recover manually using snapshots from a remote device.

About <ROOT_FS>: when you install BTRFS you can access the root fs by mounting the partition it is residing on to a location under root "/". I use /mnt. When I used the command
mount /dev/disk/by-uuid/ce2b5741-c01e-4b3d-b6ba-401ad7f7fcdf /mnt
I am actually mounting the <ROOT_FS> to /mnt. When you list the directory of /mnt you will see
@
@home
and a normal directory I made using mkdir /mnt/snapshots. Any thing I save on /mnt or /mnt/snapshot (file, subvolume, what ever, is OUTSIDE the system, i.e., it is outside @ and @home.
I can create a subvolume, say @data at /mnt/@data, and mount it as /home/jerry/data in /etc/fstab during boot. Just like @ and @home, I can make dated snapshots of @data in /mnt/snapshots independent of @ or @home, IF the stuff in @data is truely independent of either @ or @home.

That's just an inkling of why I use BTRFS.

[Chopstick]

I think you are right about the upgrade sequence, so that settles it - I need to do a clean install. And since I am already at it, I also want to resize my boot partition and then I can also look at btrfs. First, however, I should get a larger backup HD.
I don't use databases on my home partition; all my data for work is on separate data drives. The format we use is NetCDF4 or HDF5, which can grow dynamically, but this is not common.
These are formats, which are highly structured and very common in earth sciences and climate modelling. Which also nicely brings me to my grad studies: technically physics, but what I actually did was climate modelling, which is basically high-performance computing based on computational fluid dynamics and a lot of statistical analysis of very large datasets. Now, in the private sector, I mainly do modelling of climate change impacts on water resources but still some regional climate modelling as well.
If anybody has any questions about climate or climate change, I am happy to help.
What was/is your field, GreyGeek?

[GreyGeek]

Funny: I also started with kubuntu in January 2009, but for me it was the first jump into the Linux world. I think since 12.04 I have only been using the LTS, because I found I often had to reconfigure my desktop and customized settings after updates, which is time-consuming, and I have other things to worry about, too. And after I finished grad school I got even tardier with upgrades (hence my out-dated system).

As an old college prof I am curious as to your field of study in grad school

Your experience with 20.04 sounds pretty encouraging! Maybe I will upgrade before the official release. Did you do a clean install? With my old version (16.04), should I do that? It's kind of a hassle...
Along these lines, is there a particular reason you are using btrfs? I have ext4, and I don't really want to reformat my HD...
...

Since the EOL for 19.10 is only FOUR months away, I recommend 20.04 and I also recommend a CLEAN install. The EOL for 20.04 is April 2025 (but Canonical support ends at April 2023). You cannot do an upgrade from 16.04 to 20.04 directly without going through the in between LTS's, if I understand that upgrade process correctly, and it takes only about 15 minutes to do a bare metal install, AFTER you make appropriate backups of all your data. I understand that re-installing your favorite software and settings can take another 2-8 hours or so. Also, IF you do a clean install, and use BTRFS as your root filesystem, the reformatting time is negligible, especially compared to all the time you'll save in the future making snapshots of your system and incremental backups to remote storage devices. Snapshots take a second, literally. And incremental backups take less than 3 minutes per 100Gb of data, in my experience. BTRFS won't be beneficial if you are using lots of databases that involve dynamically expanding and shrinking db file structures, like virtual drives for VB, or PostgreSQL db's, etc... In that case I'd stay with EXT4 and use TimeShift for backing up.

[Chopstick]

Funny: I also started with kubuntu in January 2009, but for me it was the first jump into the Linux world. I think since 12.04 I have only been using the LTS, because I found I often had to reconfigure my desktop and customized settings after updates, which is time-consuming, and I have other things to worry about, too. And after I finished grad school I got even tardier with upgrades (hence my out-dated system).

Your experience with 20.04 sounds pretty encouraging! Maybe I will upgrade before the official release. Did you do a clean install? With my old version (16.04), should I do that? It's kind of a hassle...
Along these lines, is there a particular reason you are using btrfs? I have ext4, and I don't really want to reformat my HD...

In terms of PIM suite, after much research, I think I will probably give Evolution a shot. It seems to be the most "business ready", as in, compatible with M$ products and protocols.