so, I was doing some other things, and at the end of that, I did a quick "rm -rf /tmp" to clean out my /tmp folder.....well, just because.

Shortly after that, I fired up Evolution to check my email, and the app sits there, but seems dead. It won't respond to any menus or clicks, and the main panel displays "(No folder displayed)"

I'm running RH9, and Evolution 1.2.2-5.

I'm shocked that there would be something in /tmp that any app would expect to be there!

Or, am I chasing a Red Herring, and is something else going on?

Thanks for any suggestions!

yep
just looked in my tmp file
got a folder
evolution-502-7534
inside there

two folders
evolution_YhYhrT & evolution_Ydac1Z

both of which appear to be empty



not sure wht they do .................................

have you removed /tmp? if you ran

rm -rf /tmp

then you have. You need to remake it.

check if its there any more by:

and looking for /tmp

if its not there you need to recreate it using

and then running

That should set the /tmp folder to have the sticky bit set again.\

Next time, be more careful with what your deleting. To clear out the /tmp directory you need to do

Hope that helps

Alex

Fortunately, my linux skills are at least a notch higher than my communication skills.

I removed everything in the /tmp directory, but the /tmp directory is still there.

Since I first posted, I backed up all my data from /home/ed/evolution to /home/ed/evolution-save so I can mess around with stuff.

I also upgraded Evolution to 1.4. They get HUGE points for an easy installation...but it still doesn't seem to bring my mail back to life.

Sorry for the confusion.

I'm still poking around and researching....I'll post more if I learn anything.

ah

sorry for appearing so condescending. As far as i knew, rm -rf /tmp will remove /tmp and all the files/directories below it.

sorry,

Alex

P.S. Evolution always did seem quite cool to me. Virtual folders, inbuilt support for GnuPG and other nifty stuff. Unfortunately I love my mac too much...

oh, no worries. I didn't take it wrong at all. I didn't actually do a "rm -rf /tmp", I'm sure...I probably did a "cd /tmp" and then a "rm -rf *", but between the thoughts and the typing, it just came out wrong. But, its important to be very clear on this stuff!

Thanks for the suggestion--If I really did remove /tmp, I'd be hosed!

I've been dabbling in Linux for a year or so, and I'm finally ready to switch and make it my primary system....so its time to step up the level of knowledge. Unfortunately, things like this are still very frustrating, at best.

Well, I appear to have a sorta-workaround.

I copied over ~/evolution to ~/evolution-save

I then ran Evolution, and it asked me to go through all the config stuff again, which I did.

So, I copied ~/evolution-save back to ~/evolution.

I was then able to see all my email, but all the account settings where hosed. I went to Tools -> Settings..., and had to re-enter my email settings, and now I'm able to get my mail.

But, I'm pretty bummed that I wasn't able to restore my email settings. This seems like a pretty big problem....am I wrong about that?

Hello Ed-MtnBiker,

/tmp may seem a dir: of trivial value, but its not. Every program that runs on the system creates a file or folder(if needed) for the effecient operation. Evolution, Thunderbird, Mozilla Firefox etc.. are only some of them. Files are deleted by the respective programs after their usage. You must understand that even SSH sessions wont work properly if /tmp is not present. Also folders beginning named 'keyring-XXX' which exist for the effecient operation of the OS exist here. The temporary contents in /tmp are deleted at the time of reboot, as set in the rc.sysinit script.

Thanks;