This question is fairly specific to Evolution email client...

I have been setting up a new (to me) laptop. Installed openSuSE 11.1 in hda3 and Debian Lenny in hda5. OpenSuSE has Evolution version 2.24.1.1, and Lenny has 2.22.3.1. I would like to use the same email account from both distros.

Evolution stores mail in /home/myusername/.evolution. I deleted that directory in my SuSE home, and created a symbolic link, i.e., from within SuSE I said
It worked perfect for emails, but everything was gone from calendar and contacts. Apparently what happened with the calendar was, as soon as I created a new "appointment", it overwrote .evolution/calendar/local/system/calendar.ics. Actually I don't know when it happened, because I didn't check until after I created one appoinment as a test. (Don't worry, I backed up my old .evolution folder!).

The .evolution directory structure is the same between these 2 versions of Evolution, and I thought .ics was some sort of standard format used by several programs--so it seems like it ought to be compatible between versions. But evidently not.

Any ideas would be appreciated. I'm thinking maybe the best idea is to try to downgrade my SuSE Evolution to the same version Debian is using. Not sure how to do that.

--Thanks

Willy

Somehow, the contacts were there the next time I looked for them.

The only thing I haven't been able to import from my old Evolution is calendar entries. Sorry, I don't know what version I used to have, but it's whatever comes with Debian Etch.

The old version stored calendar appointments in ~.evolution/calendar/local/system/calendar.ics. Now that directory also contains a file called calendar.ics-beagle-A0Keyxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.db (The x's were something that I thought I better not put on the internet, since the word "Key" is in there).

That .db file looks a lot like the calendar.ics, except there's a little bit of xml code in it. Evolution somehow ignores the EVENTs I try to add to the calendar.ics file; maybe they need to get indexed in the .db file. I give up!! I'll recreate any important entries by reading the old .ics file.

Summary: Sharing the .evolution directory between distros worked fine for me even between slightly different Evolution versions. Copying the contents of the .evolution directory worked well for importing mail and contacts from the older version of Evolution, but that approach didn't work for the calendar.