Re: [Evolution] Evolution doesn't start

[Paul Smith <paul mad-scientist net>]

On Sun, 2015-02-22 at 20:12 +0100, Jörg Jenetzky wrote:
> am 22.02.2015 um 19:26 schrieb Paul Smith:
> > On Sun, 2015-02-22 at 15:17 +0100, Jörg Jenetzky wrote:
> > > Anyway, that's the newest out of the Ubuntu repositories.
> >
> > The newest _for your release of Mint_ (you don't say which release
> > you're using, but it seems pretty old).
> I wrote in the starter that I run Mint 13 Maya (=LTS).

Mint 13 is based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which is 3 years old.

The current LTS release of Ubuntu is 14.04, and the current LTS release
of Mint is Mint 17 (Quiana) (or Mint 17.1 (Rebecca)).

> > If you update to a newer version of Mint, you'll get a newer version of Evolution.
> Sure would.
> Or if I'd include Evolution into the repositories.

I don't know what "include Evolution into the repositories" means.
Evolution is part of GNOME and relies heavily on GNOME infrastructure.
There's no way you can just grab a DEB package of the latest Evolution
and install it on your very old system and expect it to work.

> There only is no use to change repositories for a program that doesn't
> run at all, not even buggy.
> It doesn't matter whether I made a mistake or there is some dependency
> problem or whatever, as long as I don't *understand* what's wrong and
> nobody is able to fix it.

I don't know why it doesn't work either.  I used Ubuntu 12.04 for quite
a while and Evolution worked OK (definitely it started).  I never used
Mint 13 but I did use Mint 16 for a while, before I switched to Ubuntu
GNOME, and Evolution worked fine for me there as well.

If Evolution won't even start before dumping core then my suspicion is
there's something corrupted about its installation in your home
directory, or "all the Evolution data" which you still have on your
drive (where did that data come from?)

I recommend the following steps:

First, create a new temporary user account on your system, log in as
that account, and try to start Evolution.  If it still dumps core, then
you need to contact the Mint folks as they have a serious problem with
their packaging of Evolution; they say your distro is supported until
April 2017... so you can find out how serious they are about that.
Upgrading to a newer version of Mint will likely solve this problem.

If starting Evolution in a new user account works, then most likely
there's something whacked about the "Evolution data" you've got.  It
would help if you described more clearly exactly where this data came
from originally, how you recovered it, etc.  It's possible we won't be
able to help you, but the directory structure and format Evolution uses
to store its data has changed over time.