[Evolution] Evolution Not Working with after Gnome 2.4 upgrade...

[Trowbridge Erich <ewtrowbr yahoo com>]

Please help me. This problem is killing me.I don't
have access to my ximian contacts until I get is
resolved, essentially grinding my work life to a
standstill.

        I finally finished upgrading my gnome2.2 to 2.4 by
installing source packages individually. Halfway
through, ximian stopped working, which I beileve has
something to do with my ORBit version changing to 2.81
from 2.6. My goal is to get ximian working again,
preferably with the latest version.  The error at the
time reported by evolution was something about "cannot
access the evolution shell" 

So I uninstall my current version, and try to do a
fresh install of evolution...

I go to the ximian installer and ximian reports: 
The installer was unable to find any Ximian products
for your operating system.
Please mail the full text of this error to
<distribution ximian com>.

So I set about installing Ximian from source, and run
into a bunch of problems... I get the source evolution
tarball, gobble through the README, and try to compile
ximian from source with flags correct (I hope) for my
system. I hack through a bunch of problems (no source
gal2.2, etc) and finally get things going to this
point...
        ./configure PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/
--enable-pilot-conduits=no --enable-nss=no
--prefix=/usr/local
--with-db3-includes=/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.3.1/include 
--with-db3-libs=/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.3.1/lib

checking for libecal-1.0... Package libecal-1.0 was
not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing
`libecal-1.0.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'libecal-1.0' found
 
I know that libecal is in the evolution-data-server
package on CVS. I try to get this running, but I run
into more problems with ACLOCAL_PATH, etc. I'm beaten.
Am I even on the right track? Do I need
evolution-data-server to compile evolution?  Is there
something i can do to get the ximian installer to
work? I understand that the reason evolution broke has
something to do with the 2.8 version of ORBit. Please
help me. How can I get my mail program working again?
For me, Evolution was the best thing about running
linux on the desktop. 

Thanks,
Erich Trowbridge
Linux N00b