[CS-FSLUG] Anyone else running Ubuntu & Evolution?

[Nathan T.]

Hey everyone,

After a recent round of updates my dad's lost the use of Evolution.  
First an update to libnss3 caused Evolution to not run entirely, and  
now after a few more updates Evolution will start, but it won't read  
the address book or e-mails. It looks like the berkley DB libraries  
aren't getting along with Evolution now.

I've tried resolving the issues by making sure no packages were  
broken, I've also made sure all the old files were where they are  
supposed to be. Apt-get thinks everything is in order, so I'm  
suspecting that in there are incompatible package versions in the  
Ubuntu repositories.

Is anyone else having these problems?

We also lost dad's address books and former e-mails, they look to be  
stored in binary files that the 'file' command identifies as berkley  
database files. Is there any way to recover the address info from  
these, I've already tried importing them using thunderbird. If  
possible dad would also like his account information back, a few ISPs  
never terminated his accounts and he can still receive the e-mail  
from them; however, if he were to call them up and ask for his  
account information they wouldn't give it to him because they don't  
realize he's still getting those e-mails.

I'm also considering an alternative distribution, which in dad's case  
would be a drastic move because he's spent years collecting a list of  
uncommon programs to use. Dad's needs consist of being able to run  
programs like Xastir and Evolution, and given that this isn't the  
first time we've had problems with Ubuntu updates breaking things,  
dependability is a must. I was considering SUSE except that dad's  
running off a 500MHz processor and maybe half a gigabyte of ram. Can  
anyone offer some suggestions (and please, no Gentoo or Slackware, we  
need as much hand-holding built into the distro as possible because I  
tend to lose my week-ends installing the next crazy app dad needs, or  
cleaning up after the latest round of messed up updates). I've been  
considering Mandriva again, except that there are no multimedia  
codecs bundled with it.

Thanks all,

Nathan T.