Evolution Missing More Icons in KDE-4.2

 Email, Evolution, Gentoo  No Responses »
Apr 142009
 

Introduction

Some time ago, I blogged on missing, or broken icons in Gnome’s Evolution, when used in the KDE desktop environment, running on a Gentoo box.  Since then, I have migrated to KDE 4.2, and I have once again experienced the same problem.  I tried using each of the icon themes installed on my system, but none of the themes were complete.  Each one was missing icons – some more, others less.  Incidentally, the new “oxygen” theme seemed the most complete.

I submitted a bug report to Gentoo’s bug tracking site and received the following answer.

Solution

Here’s the workaround provided by Timo Gurr:

$ rm ~/.gtkrc-2.0
# emerge gtk-engines
# cp /usr/share/themes/Clearlooks/gtk-2.0/gtkrc /etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc
# DIY:
     Edit /etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc
     Add: 'gtk-fallback-icon-theme = "gnome"' as the first line.

Then restart Evolution.

This worked great for me! Hopefully, Gentoo will update portage include this procedure for the evolution, gtk, or gtk-engines packages in the future.

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Enabling “Spell-Check As You Type” in Evolution

 Audio, Email, Evolution, Gentoo, web-tools  No Responses »
Apr 142009
 

Introduction

For some time, I have casually noticed that Gnome’s Evolution was not spell-checking my email messages.  Most other email clients, text editors, and even modern web-browsers, at least check your spelling as you type, underlining misspelled words with red wavy lines.  Evolution has this capability, but it was not enabled on my system.  Here is how I enabled spell-check on my Gentoo system for Evolution.

Solution

Gnome’s Evolution is dependent upon external spell checkers to perform this function.  Popular open-source checkers include ispell, aspell, and hunspell.  Aspell is newer than ispell, and was designed to replace it, at least according to aspell’s web-site.  Hunspell is an up and coming spell-checker, based on MySpell and backwards compatible with its dictionaries.  Apparently, Hunspell is used in many popular projects, such as:  OpenOffice, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Opera, and Google Chrome.

All of these above spell-checkers are developed to be language independent; therefore, you also must also install a language specific “library” or “dictionary” to complete the installation.

Evolution appears to use aspell.  However, I installed all 3 spell-checkers and English dictionaries for each checker, plus a few other utilities, like so:

# emerge -pvt app-text/aspell app-text/gnome-spell app-text/ispell \
app-text/spellutils app-vim/vim-spell-en dev-perl/Text-Aspell dev-perl/gtk2-spell \
dev-python/gtkspell-python app-dicts/aspell-en app-dicts/myspell-en

Check to make sure you satisfied with the proposed installations, and then commit:

# emerge app-text/aspell app-text/gnome-spell app-text/ispell \
app-text/spellutils app-vim/vim-spell-en dev-perl/Text-Aspell dev-perl/gtk2-spell \
dev-python/gtkspell-python app-dicts/aspell-en app-dicts/myspell-en

After emerging the above packages and restarting Evolution, I was able to select dictionaries and enable the “Check as you type” feature by navigating here:

Evolution -> Edit -> Preferences -> Composer Preferences -> Spell Checking

Now I had nice red wavy lines everywhere! 🙂

BTW, I did encounter a problem where some of my dictionaries or checkers became corrupted, so I had to re-install (re-emerge) all of the above packages to fix the problem, even though I had previously installed these packages.

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