Comments on: Canonical: Ubuntu Server Software Blitz At LinuxWorld

By: awpoopy

awpoopy — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:30:52 +0000

The citadel devs are working on a few things that will bring it to the masses. I can’t live without greylisting and for whatever reason, the rbls’ don’t seem to work. I may try it again in the near future with postfix in front of it. They could also make it easier to “skin” which would let those who think the interface is ugly – which it kinda is -make it as pretty as they like. It was pretty easy to set up, however the spam coming in made it unusable for me. I never did get kolab to work so I can’t comment on it much. I would like to see the roundcube guys get with the citadel guys.

By: IGnatius T Foobar

IGnatius T Foobar — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:18:49 +0000

Citadel does not have a “bad web interface” and is far from “going nowhere.” John Doe is expecting an Exchange alternative to be a feature-for-feature clone of Exchange, which is *not* what Citadel attempts to do. Citadel takes a unique user-focused approach to collaboration, which thousands of delighted system administrators and millions of happy users are now finding that they can’t live without once they’ve tried it.

If you want the feature set of Exchange, then you probably should be running Exchange.

By: Mitch

Mitch — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:26:37 +0000

If Citadel is good but has a bad web interface, Kolab has a decent web interface but doesn’t work well, and both are open source…

couldn’t someone put them together?

By: John Doe

John Doe — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:18:32 +0000

IGnatius T Foobar is promoting the Citadel and Kolab servers as better alternatives for Zimbra. Although he is right about Zimbra being a somewhat crippled, proprietary piece of software, he should also be aware of the major shortcomings of Citadel and Kolab.

As for Citadel, just try out their webinterface (WebCit) and compare that with Zimbra’s. You will see immediately why Citadel is going nowhere.

As for Kolab, with the Horde web-interface they have an OK web solution. However, the lack of a decent, free (windows) client is eating me. (no, Outlook does not count here.. and I DO know that there is a port of Kontact coming our way, but it is not here, yet..)
Proper CalDav support would help as well, as you then could use a standard client like Thunderbird/Lightning.

Another possibility for Thunderbird (and for other clients) would be if the Kolab-guys could talk to the other developers so that they could make their clients understand the Kolab XML format and just show the calendar view instead of this message that you need a Kolab XML client when you view the standard IMAP-folders from the email-client. I am not a programmer, but I can hardly imagine that it would be so difficult to implement…? The current solution through SyncKolab is not a good solution because you still see the calendar folders with their raw xml-messages instead of a calendar view. Which can be confusing for many of my fellow Doe’s..

And then for dessert. If Citadel and Kolab came with an easy way to incorporate and administrate Samba from their administrative interfaces as well, this would certainly have an impact. Yeah, I know thera are hacks and ways to do this, but they are too cumbersome for most people.

By: Tristan Rhodes

Tristan Rhodes — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 23:11:20 +0000

Ignatius:

I haven’t tried Zimbra so I can’t speak about how crippled the open source version is. Here is their comparison of editions:

http://www.zimbra.com/products/product_editions.html

What other solutions do you like? What about Open-Xchange?

http://www.open-xchange.com/

Thanks,

Tristan

By: IGnatius T Foobar

IGnatius T Foobar — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:01:23 +0000

For all practical purposes, Zimbra must be considered proprietary software that sits on top of a free software platform. Perhaps the “free platform” can be considered to be Linux plus the components like MySQL and Cyrus that they helped themselves to. If you want Zimbra to do anything useful, the free version is crippled — they want you to spend megabucks with them, at which point you might as well be running Exchange.

Email and groupware is such a fundamental part of the computing infrastructure that it simply must be done with end-to-end free software, lest we find ourselves locked in again. As such, the preferred solutions are 100% Pure GPL systems such as Citadel [http://www.citadel.org] and Kolab [http://www.kolab.org]. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that Zimbra is open source simply because they say it is.

By: cabreh

cabreh — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:15:33 +0000

Zimbra could do some “rallying around Ubuntu” by actually supporting the current LTS release rather than the now ancient 6.06 LTS version.