Dear world

I’ve been looking for a while now, and can’t find it. I’m using a Mac in the office, and would like to use Linux at home. However, I’m stuck with all my appointments in iCal and mail in Mail. I can basically never decently boot into Linux because I will miss appointments. I need something that can interoperate with iCal and use the _same_ calender under both OSes (I sppose IMAP could do mail). Web-interfaces are not acceptable, I want to use iCal under the Mac and Evolution under Linux.

Does anything like that exist? I basically want Outlook and Exchange without Outlook (and probably without Exchange 🙂 ). Can GMail do that, for example? Bonus points if it can import an existing calender from iCal.

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17 Responses to Dear world

  1. Please says:

    I’ll keep watching this… I’ve sought after that holy grail for a loooong time. Google’s calendar doesn’t support caldav, only manually exported/imported iCal files, quite limited.

  2. Ori Bernstein says:

    Orage, for Xfce, uses ICal internally, although I’m not sure how you’d go about importing calendars.

  3. Andrew says:

    Theoretically Spanning Sync (http://spanningsync.com/google/) can sync your iCal and Gmail Calendar. Then you just need to import the calendar into Linux.

  4. I used webdav (caldav) for sharing a .ics file from apache.
    Evolution can show remote calendars and I suppose ical can do it too.
    And then imap for mail.

    profit!

  5. Anonymous says:

    There is a number of ical/caldav servers now. Apple has one (written in python), there are others written in java, php, etc.

    The only problem is that they are most likely not compatible with everything yet.

    Apples server has been tried with ical, chandler, mozilla and mulberry (http://trac.calendarserver.org/projects/calendarserver/wiki/CalendarClients)

    Other servers such as rscds, seams to have been tried with evolution, mozilla, mulberry and chandler http://rscds.sourceforge.net/clients.php

    Have fun.

  6. Ricky says:

    If you have some webspace you can upload your ics file (as mentioned) to it. If iCal can do it periodically that’d probably be easiest, otherwise you could probably create a script to do it. Again, evolution can show remote calendars and provides full CalDAV support. It supports SMB, SSH, FTP, WebDAV, and secure WebDAV. Google calendar can both display and share ics calendars, although I don’t know if it can edit a remote calendar or make its own calendar remotely editable.
    Hope that helps.

  7. Simon Hepburn says:

    I used to get around this in a windows at work/linux at home setup by using mozilla sunbird. You need to put the ical file somewhere, I used icalexchange.com. Have not used sunbird for a while as I work from home at the moment and prefer evolution/epiphany to the mozilla products, but I hear the sunbird developers have some kind of google calendar integration planned:

    http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar/2007/03/branch_sunbird_and_google_cale.html

  8. alex says:

    Hi Ronald!
    My tip: Try http://icalx.com/
    It works great for me. I’m not using iCal but since it’s the same format you should be just fine.

  9. erik says:

    Just move all your mail and calendaring to Gmail. It’s convenient and works well, and all your data is safe from local hardware failures and such. If it was me the Evolution would be removed from all Linux distros 🙂

  10. smk says:

    Evolution uses iCal format internally.

    Mount your Mac partition under Linux. Create the wanted calendars under Evolution just to get the gConf entries.
    Then go to ~/.evolution/calendar/local/system/ and link (ln -sf …) your iCal calendars as Evolution .ics files. Should work. (At least worth a try… 😉 )

  11. smk says:

    erik: I’m glad it’s not up to you to decide what goes into Linux distros.

    It happens that I don’t really like the idea of launching my GPRS/EDGE connection every time I’d like to check my appointments and notes while I’m in the city.

    That’s why I migrated from GMail to Evolution.

  12. Sam says:

    I use schedule world http://www.scheduleworld.com, which supports syncing with evolution using a program called syncevolution and automatically syncs with gmail.

    The other bonus is that I can sync with my phone using syncml over gprs/edge.

    Apparently spanning sync http://blog.spanningsync.com/ works to sync with iCal under OSX.

  13. So, here’s a short summary of what I’ve done so far:

    – I loved smk’s suggestion, simple and no webservices needed. Unfortunately, doesn’t really work, since iCal puts tasks/calender in the same file, whereas iCal doesn’t. It means you either only share the calender, or you lose your tasks everytime you make a modification in Evolution. Too bad, this would’ve been lovely.

    – I tried reinout’s suggestion to use GCal and sync as a “web-service”. It’s one-way, so I can’t write to it, but this is better than nothing. I currently don’t see all of the calendar entries popping up in my clock applet, which is a big problem. they do show up in Evolution after three tries (the first time, it would only copy the entries for this week, and even now I don’t think it has all of them, some of the ones for next month are missing, even though they are available in GCal).

    – spanningsync/scheduleworld… See, the idea is kind of ok, but why do I need 3 webservices (SS, SW, GCal) for something simple like sharing a calender between two applications. This is not just ridiculous, this is insane. The worst thing is that in addition to those 3 webservices, I also need to add 2 plugins to my applications. This is unacceptable.

    – Using GCal is not an option, as said before. I need offline operation, I like desktop integration thingies like evolution-in-my-clock, etc.

    – CalDav is nice (it’s basically closer to what I’m looking for), but is scheduled for OS X 10.5, so it doesn’t work yet. I’ll test this when Leopard (10.5) comes out.

    – iCal has the convenient option to publish your calender online. This would work quite well. I don’t think Evolution has a similar feature, which makes it about as good as GCal (except that I can’t make changes to the calendar at all under Linux, unless I fancy text-mode editors on a ssh connection).

    The options I’m currently considering are GCal with read-only access in Evolution, or the publishing-in-iCal with (again) read-only access in Evolution. GCal has the advantage that it actually allows me to make changes from within Linux, even though it’s not in Evolution. I haven’t looked at how this works under iCal yet, but that shouldn’t be an issue. I could always consider SS/SW if it really becomes annoying, but I’d rather not.

  14. Abbas Kha says:

    google calendar can do it, i have the calendar online for me in osx and imported into my ical using subscribe, so you can view it locally or offline and same goes for evolution, i have it saved locally, and any change i make i make it in google calendar and then it’s updated into calendar’s next time i sync:).

  15. David Tenser says:

    I’m using Mozilla Thunderbird/Lightning which allows me to dual-boot between Windows XP and Linux and share the mail and calendar data on a shared FAT32 partition.

    The calendars are stored in iCal format, so it’s easily readable by other software as well.

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