syncing with google calendar

[balaji.md]

If anyone is interested on google calendar sync, sunbird1.0b1 (standalone) works fine on puppy 525. Just unzip it and it runs fine from its package! Google calendar sync has some stuttering when you try to change events from sunbird. Sometimes it duplicates events on Gcal. I rarely change the Gcal from sunbird - mainly use it to read Gcal, so no problems. Overall works fantastic.

I did not like the whole Thunderbird lightning mammoth package which devours ram. Osmo is fine for simple calendaring. But when it comes to complex scheduling I find sunbird good.

[jakfish]

Thanks for the good tip. With stronger hardware (Asus EEE 900/Puppeee 4.31), I ran Thunderbird/Lightning to do one-way sync (Google-to-Linux), until I moved to GPE-Calendar.

GPE (I used the Debian Lenny version) is very fast and syncs well with Google Calendar.

But now I'm using very old Vaio hardware with Puppy 4.31 and while GPE Calendar runs fine, I can't find a lightweight Contacts program that can sync, even one-way, with Google Contacts.

Have you come across any? Osmo won't do it, and right now, I'm importing Outlook-made CSV files into SeaMonkey Addressbook, very tedious.

Jake

[balaji.md]

I rely on Sylpheed now (which has proved to be extra-ordinarily more powerful than the latest outlook that I ran on a business tablet)! I imported the CSV files from google. The actual file seems to have a bit of field matching error but after a bit of trial and error, I could get the display name and the email address to properly show up on Sylpheed. After the initial list population, every email address that is responded to, gets automatically into Sylpheed address book.

Hope this helps.

[jakfish]

That's a good tip, the Sylpheed-vcf. The rub is, usually it's names and emails only. There should be a way to get Home and Work addresses in the mix, but I haven't found it.

Google exports its contacts in one big vcf file. How did you import that and did you get addresses?

Thanks,
Jake

[balaji.md]

I just exported the contacts in CSV format and imported them to Sylpheed addressbook. It should be possible to import all of the information contained in the CSV file, technically speaking.

May be one of the developers here will create a "Gcontactsync" plugin for Sylpheed!

[jakfish]

What I've opted for is running SeaMonkey 2.*, then using gcontactsync plugin, which will synch all of google contacts with SM Addressbook.

With my hardware, it takes considerable time to start up SM.

I'd still like to find a lighter-weight contact app that can do actual sync with google on the fly, rather than convert>import.

Jake

[cowboy]

But when it comes to complex scheduling I find sunbird good.

The only problem with Sunbird is...that Mozilla is sunsetting the entire application, ie, stopping development. No further releases or updates will be provided. Not sure how this might affect syncing with google calendar in the future.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird/

Mozilla is encouraging users to move to Lightning. As to how long they will support that? Your guess is as good as mine. Starting to wonder about the folks over at Moz, considering the whole Firefox 4/5 brouhaha.

[balaji.md]

Out of interest, I tried the GPE calendar (Ubuntu .deb package). Installed all the dependencies and got it working. But, strangely it crashes while syncing with google calendar!

Sunbird on the other hand, although requires Java, is reasonably quick and has a much nicer, more customizable look.

[balaji.md]

But when it comes to complex scheduling I find sunbird good.

The only problem with Sunbird is...that Mozilla is sunsetting the entire application, ie, stopping development. No further releases or updates will be provided. Not sure how this might affect syncing with google calendar in the future.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird/

Mozilla is encouraging users to move to Lightning. As to how long they will support that? Your guess is as good as mine. Starting to wonder about the folks over at Moz, considering the whole Firefox 4/5 brouhaha.

I heard about that. May be puppy linux developers should make a lightweight version of sunbird and continue its development.