Thursday, January 24, 2008

KOrganizer and Google Calendar Sync

Yet once again, due to compatibility issues, when my Thunderbird upgraded, Lightning stopped working!!! !@#$ and as usual, lost my calendar :( I was kinda liking the newer version of lightning for it looked more polished and had more controls, until it crashed.

Last time Shaw (aka Amit, but I prefer Shaw!) suggested using korganizer, it looked sleek but I wanted something that can now sync my calendar with online service, say Google Calendar. So if something crashes, I don't loose all my data. I failed to find a decent tutorial on how to do that. Until, today, totally frustrated, I Googl'ed harder. But this time around, it wasn't hard to find one. After failed attempts to get sync working with tips from 4-5 tutorials and already invested half a day in it, just before retiring the tought, I picked up one more tutorial. Just 2 para of how to get it working. DAMN! This seems cool!

So here I go.... and BINGO! Got the damn thing working! This means, even if my local app crashes, I would still have my online-calendar safe! Or so I think!

For the curious souls, here's an extremely short version of the original tutorial I read.
  1. Download, un[tar|zip] GCALDaemon (requires JRE >= 1.5)
  2. Execute /whatever_path/standalone-start.sh (if you are going to use it regularly, better add it to your startup scripts)
  3. Find your private iCal URL by going to Google Calendar by clicking Settings -> Calendars -> Your Calendar and clicking the ICAL button at the bottom.
  4. Replace http://www.google.com with http://localhost:9090
  5. Create a new KOrganizer calendar by going to the Calendar tab, clicking the Add button, selecting "Calendar in Remote File,"
  6. Past the private URL in the "Download to" and "Upload to" fields
  7. Check Automatic Reload -> Regular Interval
  8. Check Automatic Save -> On Every Change

From here on, the 2 calendars will be in sync! But note that it might take a few minutes to get the changes synced. But unlike what original tutorial mentioned, I could get all adds/mods/dels from both, KOrganizer and Google Calendar, working and reflected correctly!

Phew! Wish I don't have to loose my calendar anymore now!

For more details, you are directed to read Calendaring: Google Calendar and KOrganizer

6 comments:

Amit Shah said...

Oh that's great! one more win for KDE ;-)

BTW, I'm at http://www.amitshah.net/

Anonymous said...

That's if you can get it work! I come up with localhost 9090 unavailable. Not much documentation or web searching helped. I am a Linux user NOT a guru. If your a "user", I might almost say beware. Program is great, I just can't find help for the problems.

The Shaolin said...

@ anonymous...
Don't know how to reach you, should you check back on these comments...
this is how you can check if GCALDaemon is listening on port 9090 or not:
lsof -i :9090
expect something akin to:
java .... .... 9u IPv6 13076 TCP *:9090 (LISTEN)

sorgud said...

Hi,
Excellent instructions.
Thus Korganizer duplicate events.
It doesn't "merge" the events.
Add the different ones as well as the events (I have already synchronized manually).
Any thoughts?

thanks in advance
talueguito
raul

Unknown said...

Did you have any problems with entries in Kontact never making it to Google Calendar? If I add something in Kontact as a Google Calendar resource it eventually vanishes, no sign of it on either Kontact or Google. If I add something to Google it does make it to Kontact. Any one else seeing this?

Oh, and thanks for the info :)

And I'm at http://spinsheet.blogspot.com

The Shaolin said...

@leupi
I don't see the problem you mentioned. It worked both ways well for me. I would check these two:
0. There is a sync option (immediate, some interval, or on closing, something like that). Check that it is correct.
1. Recheck the iCal URLS and permissions.
I haven't tried it again since I moved from Debian to Ubuntu 2 months back. But no issues until then. Will update you once I do.
Hope this works for you.