thelinuxlink.net

Currently my PIM is on windows using MS Outlook. I don't actually use the application, I use other programs that interact with it and treat it like a database. My PDA software syncs to Outlook, and I use intellisync software to sync Outlook to my Yahoo calander and address book. I'm having a hard time figuring out how I'm going to do this, or something similar, with linux.

Is there any software that syncs a linux PIM with a web based PIM? Or are there any linux PIMs that can be set to display information via the web when a web browser is pointed to my server? I don't need to use a commercial application, I just want to be able to get to my calander and address book from any computer when I forget my PDA at home (which is too frequent).

I've been searching for something that does this for awhile now and figured I'd start asking for help.

This is a tough one. Calendars and PDA seem to mostly favor Outlook. And that stinks. I ran into this problem a few months back before I stopped using my pda all together.

I have a work calendar in GroupWise and kept my own calendars using Sunbird (Mozilla's Calendar). The only way I could share the calendar out in Sunbird was to put the ics file on a webdav enabled server. This way I could run sunbird at home and at work on multiple computers and all have them configured to use the same calendar. Because I used the ics format I could also get Apple iCal to use the calendar; this was critical for syncing with palm.

OS X's isync and the Palm Desktop seem to be the only usable conduits on OS X for syncing. Neither of these sync with Outlook or GroupWise. But, syncing with iCal allowed me to sync the palm with my personal calendars via webdav.

So to sync my work calendars with my personal calendars, I had to sync the palm on a Windows system using Intellisync to get the GroupWise stuff into the palm. The sync the Palm with OS X to get it into iCal and uploaded to my webdav calendars.

Now KDE's Organizer allows me to sync with my webdav based calendars and I do believe you can sync a palm with korganizer (you can probably do this is Gnome too). Now the tricky part is syncing with yahoo. I tried with yahoo but could not get the calendar into korganizer. I doubt it will allow you to upload the info either.

Yahoo has an export feature to dba (Palm Desktop) or csv (Outlook) but neither is read by the standard koriganizer (maybe I need to get the kde pim packages).

It's late and I'm sick, so I'll wait until tomorrow to absorb all that. ;-) But I'm not married to yahoo, if there are command line arguments that could be issued to make whatever the PDA sync's with available as a web page that would be fine with me, I know my computers IP, and command line commands can be automated in a script.

In the end I'm not going to get rid of windows compleatly, it still owns the field in the kind of games I like to play (though linux does support enough that that system will become a dual-boot system). So I'm not in any major rush to migrate if it'll take a bit of coding. But I would like to move it over ultimately because outlook isn't the most secure way to store personal information, and I would prefer to not need to load windows other than to play games.

Man, that's a tough one. I've set up an old linux box to use webdav and apache so that when I'm at work and am forced to use a mac, I can publish the calendar to the webdav server, from where a program called phpicalendar takes over and displays the .ical file as a web page. I haven't found an equivalent for vcards, and you might not want that information public, and I doubt you want to go through all the effort of getting apache set up, so I'd say that option is out.

I'm not sure what linux distro you're using, but I put an freenx server on my box at home, and if you're able to install it, it is truly a thing of beauty. I've never used a remote desktop application that runs like this, and I've used a few other VNCs on linux. This one puts them to shame for responsiveness and speed. It lets me use an NXclient from nomachine.com to connect to my home computer, and gives me my home desktop on the remote machine, so it's just like I'm working on my computer at home, only a bit slower. I use it pretty often to open up file attachments that the Mac at work can't handle, like Wordperfect files, at least while I'm waiting for OpenOffice.org 2.0 to go stable on OS X.

So I always install the NXclient on any computer I work with pretty frequently, and I also carry a Knoppix disk, which has the NXclient on it, in case I need to use it on another machine where I don't or can't do an install. I always have access to any of my data as long as my Internet connection is running.

If you're not afraid of the command line, you can also use ssh, which is what Freenx uses to make the connection anyway, then then you could always get into your linux box, go to where the contacts are stored (~/.kde/share/apps/kabc/std.vcf for Kontact), and use less to find the person you're looking for.

Unfortunately I don't think there's an easy way to do what you would like to do, until someone gets Kitchensync to sync to a web page or something like that. I had a lot of fun learning how to use ssh while I was bored at work, and I learned much of the CLI basics from that experience, like how to configure the router to do port forwarding, and fiddle with some configuration files to get services working. Then there's ssh port forwarding, which one can use to completely circumvent a strict proxy, if you know what you're doing. Once I got that working, Freenx seemed like a snap. If you're willing to fiddle with it, I'd say try these things out, since I enjoyed learning from it all, even if I did get frustrated at times. Learning how to use mutt and links is also cool, if you ever screw X up.

I have an ubuntu server box at home that I've been doing my playing in. I might eventually switch it to Debian when I gain more confidence in my abilitys. I already have apache2 running and it works fine when I access it from within my LAN. I've not yet exposed port 80 to the internet on the router end as I want to understand whatever security issues I need to be aware of first, but I plan to do so eventually.

I'm not afraid of programming, if there is a PIM with an API that I can use without a great deal of effort I'm willing to write my own scripts to pull the information from the PIM every once in awhile and write it's own pages. It'd be nice if this was already done, but so long as it isn't too difficult to access the information I can't imagine it being very difficult to build whatever web interface I want from it and setting the program to run once or twice a day to refresh the content.

I just don't know what's out there, and what can do what. Google hasn't been very helpful, they need to build a brain interface so I can just get to what I want to know instead of playing keyword shuffle. ;-)

Evolution works reasonably nicely with PDAs, but I'm not sure about web-based stuff. I think you may be able to export to iCal, which would probably do the job.

Vogateer wrote: I use it pretty often to open up file attachments that the Mac at work can't handle, like Wordperfect files, at least while I'm waiting for OpenOffice.org 2.0 to go stable on OS X.

A bit off topic, but I've been using OO2 pretty much exclusively on OS X for a few weeks now and it's been great.

Back on topic; one of the buggers here seems to be linking the calendar with a service like Yahoo. There you are pretty limited as to what you can do and I don't know if they published the api to allow someone to write a client.

I was hoping the Hula project would take some of this trouble out of the mix, but I'm not sure about the future there as Novell dropped their support. Will it continue on? Maybe I should look into that.

I ran Hula, it looked like a great system. But it just wasn't ready yet when I was using it. I hope they continue working on it.

This may be overkill, but there are several groupware systems that are web based. They also allow clients like Evolution. OpenGroupWareis one, I'm sure there are others.

Nah, I mentioned before I'm not married to Yahoo. It's neat how I can allow other people to add things to my calander on Yahoo, but no one I've mentioned it to has ever bothered. I'm willing to write a program that will generate and upgate the html calanders and update my server every once in awhile, but the PIM in question would then need an API or a readable filesystem so I could fetch the information without a great deal of hair pulling.