Recently I switched from Mandriva to OpenSUSE. Not that I was unhappy about Mandriva, not at all, it is with pain that I have to leave. The problem I had was that I’m a developer and while the Mandriva developers were busy wrapping up there Spring edition, I just had to live with older packages for KDE, while kdepim was moving rapidly with new dependencies on Qt and kdelibs. Don’t worry, I’ll be back Mandriva.

Anyhow, Mandriva did not ship Mailody at all, but that was fixed just after I installed it, and after install OpenSUSE I noticed that the Mailody version shipped did not include the patch which fixes tagging of messages. And as everyone told me they have a build service, I decided this afternoon to give it a shot.

And it is awesome. In no-time I’ve setup a personal repository and uploaded the source tarball, two patches and a spec file. After uploading the spec file, the build kicked in automatically and almost immediately. The build log can be followed real-time, so I could immediately see it did not like one of the patch files. I needed a couple of tries to get it right. The help in #opensuse-buildservice was to the point and accurate too.

A few minutes later I had the packages I wanted build successfully. Yay. It is a very straight forward system and if you have packaged stuff before, you understand it very easily. One unclear point was the ‘file upload’ part. You have a pull down that tells you ‘source’ or ‘patch’. It was not clear to me that I should also upload the spec file there. Also, the first time you completed the build, you do not know where your personal repositories are, because that’s only displayed one level up, instead of on the package page itself. Details.

We need an Akonadi logo. If you are an artist and want to design a logo: do it! This is your chance to become famous instantly.

Not only do we want a general logo for Akonadi, we also need an icon for the Akonadi tray applitcation. Can be the same or something different. We also have no clear idea about what we want, so anything you can up with can be the winner of his contest.

The jury are the Akonadi-hackers, we will announce the winner here! You are allowed to bribe the jury.

List your entry at the techbase page.

Last blog I wrote syncing was working between KOrganizer and my Nokia. I have to correct that. It does not work.

After the post I made a connection to the company agenda in KOrganizer. And after hitting the the sync button of Kitchensync it started to sync the company agenda. Well, that was not so bad, having the company agenda in my phone is actually a benefit.

The next day I hit sync again. Now KOrganizer had all the company agenda items in my personal agenda resource. That’s bad. After cleaning up that mess (it took me hours to extract my personal data from the agenda) I just decided that I could live with it: remember to turn off the company agenda before quiting KOrganizer, sync, start KOrganizer, turn on the company agenda resource.

But now there is a new problem. Every new day I sync KOrganizer with my phone it duplicates all items on the phone, /some/ with a shift of two hours, even without touching those agenda items, not on my phone and not within KOrganizer.

This sync story is getting ridiculous. I don’t understand how companies deal with this. The basic idea of syncing is … syncing. Finding duplicates, merge the info and keep those two in exact sync. If Kitchensync – based on OpenSync – can not do that, they both should be excluded from the distro’s.

I have tried for hours and hours to get my Nokia to sync with kdepim using Mandriva. I’ve read all the documentation I could find on the internet and tried five dozen different msynctool configurations and workarounds via for example Funambol (which can not seem to sync to kdepim at all).

Untill my co-worker asked for the bluetooth device and pulled out all addresses and contacts without a single problem from within Gentoo.

As I’m not a big fan of compiling, I decided to switch to OpenSuse. I really like Mandriva and their polish, but I have spent enough time trying to get it to work.

After installing OpenSuse, I configured KitchenSync and to my surprise it synced without any problems my Contacts, even with there photo’s. After setting the KOrganizer Calendar to VCalendar instead of ICalendar, all my agenda items also synced (took me some time to figure that out though).

So, now I can finally use KOrganizer again for my daily work, and that means exploring the huge amount of options. I must say, I’m very pleased with it. It has some KMail specific calls in there, I need to fix those DOESNOTWORKFORME bugs soon. ;-)

Martin Meredith asks if mail should be filtered on the imap-server or on the mail client side. The answer in my humble opinion is both.

First of all you want to be able to filter things on the server side, for me that means splitting the KDE stuff from the work and private mail.

But after that I can still imagen you want to do spamassassin on your computer if the hoster does not provide it for example.

The trick in all this is that it should be easy for the user. That means that the server side filters should be configurable inside the application, just like where you setup regular filters. Maybe in an ideal world it is just a combined view to the user, possibly just a checkbox ‘Apply this filter on the server’ if needed.

There exists a sieve library within KDE, I haven’t looked at it yet, but it is on my list to look at, it would be nice to have full support for the server based sieve filters within any KDE application that wants it. But it is not on my short-term todo list. And I would be very happy if someone else beats me to it.