Ah, the joys of using Linux in a Windows world. With a couple of Fedora Core 4 installations under my belt, I was pleased that many things just work. But of course the bulk of my attention goes to the many things that just don’t.

I’m trying to use Evolution as an Outlook replacement. I can interact with my inbox on the Exchange server with no problems. However, I can’t see my calendar at all. I push the ‘Calendars’ button, and I see a list of calendars in the pane above the buttons. The calendar view, to the right, is completely devoid of appointments. When I try to select one of the checkboxes corresponding to a calendar, a status message ‘Opening exchange://myusername@domain@server/personal/Calendar (...)’ appears at the bottom of the window for a fraction of a second, as does a checkmark in the checkbox I clicked, but both disappear quickly. It’s so odd. And aggravating.

I did just now manage to mount my Windows partition, after installing the NTFS kernel module. Yea for that.

Fedora automounts my iPod Mini, but I’m at a loss when I get to gtkpod. It tells me iPod Database Import Failed: ‘Illegal seek to offset 654644 (length 4) in file ’/media/ipod/iPod_Control/iTunes/iTunesDB’.‘

I’d like to be able to print to networked printers, but I haven’t been able to locate them using printconf-gui.

Fedora ships a version of xscreensaver without any graphics demos. Granted, it gives you a perfectly functional blank screen, but for anyone who’s used xscreensaver before and expects to be presented with a list of graphics demos to choose from, it looks like a bug.

As for video, I tried to watch the Quicktime clip of Cisco ripping out the pages of Michael Lynn’s presentation on Cisco’s critical vulnerabilities, but neither Totem nor Helix, the two video players Fedora installs, come with Quicktime decoders. I installed a succession of GStreamer plugins before finding the module that decodes .movs: gstreamer-ffmpeg.