I recently switched from years and years of trust blackberry service with little to no linux support I found myself slightly disgruntled. I can come up with a few workarounds for Gnome for family members but, for KDE it was a nightmare. So, I decided to bite the bullet and get a Google Android phone. Being on the Verizon network I settled on the Motorola Droid. No, this will not be a fanboy post on the Droid so don’t worry.
After a while and accumulating around 500 contacts on my phone and seeing how it backed up to Google Contacts and the best part, Google Calendar I knew there had to be an easy way to sync this all up. After poking around I’ve found a great way using libgcal [1]
As a note, I am using Kubuntu 10.04LTS for this.
So, we will start with the necessary items.
sudo apt-get install libgcal0
and
sudo apt-get install akonadi-kde-resource-googledata
These are in the repositories however, the libgcal project has the source for a slightly newer version. [1]
Once installed open Akonadi Tray Utility. (Using Krunner: Alt+F2 akonaditray)
Once there Right Click on the Akonadi Tray icon and click Configure
To ensure that the Google Options are there you need to restart the Akonadi server. On the tab labled ‘Akonadi Server Configuration there is a nifty restart button, click it.
After restarted go back to the Akonadi Resources Configuration tab.
Click to add a new resource.
Select the Akonadi Google Calendar Resource
Supply your google username and password.
Once again click and and select the Akonadi Google Contacts Resource. Once again, input your google user and password.
Once that is finished you should be able to open KAddressBook and KOrganizer to view your synced contacts.
[1]http://code.google.com/p/libgcal/downloads/list
Tags: 10.04, akonadi, Android, Google, google calander, google contacts, kaddressbook, KDE, korganizer, Kubuntu, libgcal, Linux, LTS, Motorola, sync, Ubuntu
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I wish it were that easy.
* You can not sync more than the default calendar (critical for me, as I have to have my business dates in a separate calendar)
* The Contacts show only a poorly minimal set of the data from google. (Today it showed even nothing when clicking on a contact)
Akonadi is clearly not even close to be usable (pre alpha). For me the whole akonadi experience is really bad. There are autostart issues where akonadi dumps a lot of error messages (workaround is to manually start the akonadi console and akonadi before starting kontact).
IMHO they should not have it released until it’s working reliably. Calendar and contact data are critical for all of us. We can not have a software that does not work completely trust this critical data.
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* You can not sync more than the default calendar (critical for me, as I have to have my business dates in a separate calendar)
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It s the most important feature. Without this, it s unusable in my opinion
Akonadi certainly has a huge potential…. but you’re right, it’s crashing to much. And I cannot use contact groups (a.k.a. distribution lists) as of KDE 4.4 – really disgusting
, but no show-stopper for me personally.
It needs a lot of love and bug-hunting. Hope the KDE community has done it during the 4.5 cycle or will do it during the 4.6 cycle. This is really an issue.
Which is simply epic. Thanks for the valuable post.
Even as I really like a physical keyboard, after managing the Samsung Captivate for roughly 15 minutes, it is onerous to move back. At the moment I’m debating whether to visit Verizon for the Droid X, move to Dash for the EVO, or stick with AT&T for the Captivate…selections, decisions.