Friday, April 22, 2011

Kontact with google calendar

Hey all, with the help of some friendly folks in #kontact I was able to get mail/calendar set up and working in kontact today. I previously had some bad settings in akonadi from my last attempt a few months (maybe a year?) back. and clearing .config/akonadi helped alleviate that problem.

Since I've been using an android phone lately much of my calendar and mail stuff is on google services, so naturally I wanted to sync my calendar, contacts, and mail with google. Fortunately this is all possible, unfortunately it's not all that clear how to set it up. So here's a quick walkthrough for future reference.

Lets look at the tricky one, calendars. To add a google calendar to your korganizer you just need the caldav address which you can get from the calendar's settings like this.













Then you'll need the google calendar url to plug your calendar's address into which can be found in the help section, here for convenience:



Then you can open korganizer (or kontact) and right click the calendar manager and choose Add Calendar. It will give you a list of resources like this:




Since google calendars support CalDav choose the Dav groupware resource. Here's where the ui could use some update and/or simplification. The next thing you will see is a list of calendar providers, of which google is not a part like this:

The trick (thanks Leo) here is to click cancel since google is not on the list. Strangely (most cancel buttons close instead of continuing) this continues to a dialog to let you add your calendar by url that looks like this:





You can finally put in your url (combine the google calendar url with your calendar's address) and enter your username (foo@gmail.com) and hit the fetch button. After entering your username again (not sure why it doesn't take the one you already set) and password you are able to choose your calendar and add it to korganizer.

Anyone that votes we simplify this process raise your hand :) o/

14 comments:

WindPower said...

But I don't have "Dav groupware resource" D: Am I missing a package or something? (KDE 4.6.2)

sergio said...

You need kdepim and kdepim-runtime from master.

Anonymous said...

I believe I covered this a short while ago here:
http://thinkmoult.com/2011/02/21/syncing-kontact-with-android/

It's also a little bit more detailed in case people want a few alternatives :) (I myself now use a Kolab server - and yes, Android can sync very well with Kolab)

Anonymous said...

@Moult: Based on your post i wrote a german version. Also 2 months ago. ;)

http://beyondserenity.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/kontact-2-akonadi-und-wie-android-dazu-passt/

Anonymous said...

Raising hands!

Lets make it simple

Like "Add a google calender", "Add a #vendor calender" "add..." - you get the Idea. And if the default venders do not match it, lets make a "others" button for the current process.

Anyway it has to be simplified.

Anonymous said...

how do you get the gmail contacts to sync with kaddressbook?
I think that would be killer

Kromain said...

So I suppose the advantage of CalDAV is that the calendar is in read-write access?

That's really nice, but yeah then the UI needs a serious fix :-/
(need to click cancel to get to the manual settings, hello ??)

Quentin said...

Same problem here, no "Dav groupware resource" on openSUSE...

Martin S. said...

you either have to compile kontact from git or wait until kontact 2 is released, or you can use the following plugin for kontact: kcaldav

Anonymous said...

Can you synchronize the tasks too??

nusch said...

Does this instruction apply to stable version of KDE or I first need to install some beta packages? (Using ubuntu)

undrwater said...

Worked for me while I was in session, but the calendar disappeared once I logged out. Anyone have a clue why?

Anonymous said...

As of KDE 4.8.1 this doesnt work anymore...
I get an error from akonadi without enough information to file a bugreport... :(

Unknown said...

Works flawlessly with KDE 4.8.2. Cheers for the info :)