Migrating mail from Evolution on Linux

Brownoxford — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 20:03:52 +0000

Migrating mail from one installation of Novel Evolution (formerly Ximian Evolution) to another is possible, but if not done carefully it is easy to lose messages and corrupt files. The simplest method, and the most error prone is probably just to copy the .evolution directory from one machine to another. The problem with doing that is that you will be carrying over all of the internal indices and data files created by Evolution, in addition to the actual mail files. If you are migrating to a different version of Evolution, or if the target installation is already set up with its own data directory, you are very likely going to cause problems. Another method is to select folders and drag them to the desktop, copy them to the target machine, and drag them into the target folder in the new Evolution instance. This works pretty well most of the time, but often the process of dragging folders to the desktop causes messages to be saved without line-breaks between them. On import, these run-in messages will be seen as a single messages, resulting in corruption and possible data loss. A more robust option is to take the actual mbox-format mail files that Evolution is using, copy them to the target machine, and import them by dragging them onto folders in the new installation. In addition to avoiding the problems with the other methods described, this method will also preserve message status as stored in the X-Evolution header. This is also the only method that can be used to migrate to a mail client other than Evolution, such as Mozilla Thunderbird. The following script can be used to copy all of the mbox data files from an Evolution installation into the current working directory.

#!/bin/sh

MAILDIR=${HOME}/.evolution/mail/local

find $MAILDIR -type f -print | \
  egrep -v '(index.data|cmeta|summary-meta|ev-summary|ibex.index)' | \
while read MBOX; do
  [ -s "$MBOX" ] || continue;
  FNAME=`echo $MBOX              | \
         sed -e "s#$MAILDIR/##g" | \
         sed -e 's/\.sbd//g'     | \
         sed -e 's/\//_/g'`
  echo "Backing Up: $FNAME";
  cp $MBOX $FNAME
done

A tool like scp or rsync can be used to transfer all of the mailbox files to the target machine where they can be imported one at a time. This script can also be used to back-up a local mail repository for safe-keeping.

Using The Audiovox DC400 DV Camcorder With Linux

Brownoxford — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 23:07:09 +0000

I was going through my collection of random electronic devices recently, and came across an Audiovox DC400 DV camcorder that I had acquired awhile back. The DC400 is an affordable camcorder with limited functionality... perfect for a webcam. I decided to get it set up on my Fedora Core 6 linux machine so that I could use the video conferencing functionality of Ekiga.

Unfortunately, the DC400 does not work with an out of the box Fedora Core 6 install, so I needed to figure out how to get it up and running. There wasn't a lot of information on the web about using this camera with Linux, so hopefully this page will help somebody else with the same problem.

The easiest way I know of to find a driver for a new device is to get the manufacturer and device ID from lsusb, so I plugged the camera into my USB bus and ran lsusb. Depending on what mode the camera is in, there are two different values that lsusb will report. The default mode seems to be 'MASS STORAGE', which will produce the following output:

[root@desktop ~]# lsusb
Bus 001 Device 017: ID 055f:c361 Mustek Systems, Inc.

The other mode, which is the one that you need in order to use the DC400 as a webcam, is 'PC CAM'. You can switch modes by hitting the 'FUNC' button on the control panel of the camera. The output from lsusb after switching modes is:

[root@desktop ~]# lsusb
Bus 001 Device 016: ID 055f:c360 Mustek Systems, Inc. Mustek DV 4000

A little digging around in Google produced the homepage for the GSPCA/SPCA5XX linux webcam driver, which listed the Mustek DV 4000 as a supported device. I downloaded the suggested driver package for my kernel version, compiled it, and installed it with no problems.

wget http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca50x/Download/gspcav1-20061216.tar.gz
tar xfz gspcav1-20061216.tar.gz
cd gspcav1-20061216
make && make install

Once I got through the difficult part of identifying the required driver, the rest was easy, I didn't even have to add any modprobe configuration lines because the appropriate module is loaded automatically when you switch to 'PC CAM' mode.

Chris Abernethy . com» Linux

Migrating mail from Evolution on Linux

Using The Audiovox DC400 DV Camcorder With Linux