Rediscovering KOrganizer

Posted by toma on April 15, 2008; This entry is filed under English.

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. ;-)

10 Comments

  1. Anoniemoes April 18th, 2008 at 01:24

    Cheers. Found it.

  2. Tom Albers April 17th, 2008 at 09:54

    You can switch in the settings of that particular resource. If you don’t have a resources box at the bottom left, you can turn in it on by Settings->Sidebar.

  3. jammer April 17th, 2008 at 05:13

    How do you go about switching from iCalendar to vCalendar format ?
    I’ve been through the Korganizer and Calendar configs and don’t see any option for that.

  4. Goblin April 15th, 2008 at 20:55

    I had the same problem with my Nokia 6300. I still can’t get it to synch my contacts/calendar although, to be fair, I haven’t tried in the last 6 months or so. Getting pictures and other contents from the phone via bluetooth works, but the synching really bugs me.
    What Nokia model do you use? Please tell me that you got it to work with your Nokia _6300_. Please?
    The last time I tried it, KitchenSynch was still very basic and didn’t help to solve my problem.
    Your article kinda respawned my interest to look deeper into it once more.

    Cheers, Goblin

  5. Tom Albers April 15th, 2008 at 21:05

    I have an e65, it seems a tricky combination of drivers and versions.

    I found http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSync/SyncML-OBEX-Client interesting. The testcases described there might help you finding the ‘real’ errors.

  6. Harry ten Berge April 15th, 2008 at 21:16

    Hi,

    I’ve got a ‘working’ configuration using opensync 0.22 (standard on OpenSUSE) in combination with Evolution and a Nokia E65. Very straightforward, I’ve got it working in about 15 minutes.

    One issue though: at the end of the sync ‘msynctool’ is dead. You have to give it a CTRL+C :-( Syncing works however, and the ‘msynctool is dead in the end’ is a known issue.

    The main issue I have is the development scheme of OpenSync. And to be honest: I think KitchenSync is *not* the way to go. Syncing should be completely integrated in (KDE) PIM software, and should be really easy te setup.

    Regards Harry

  7. Goblin April 15th, 2008 at 21:36

    I agree with Harry, opensynch got me a lot further than KitchenSynch did, but still not to the point where I was actually able to synch the phone.
    You guys are lucky since you have the e-series, that one is supported, the others are not.
    Nokia themselves don’t offer any advice or help either. The part I don’t get is that the 6300 supports SynchML, but it’s not working with the synchtools which are available in Linux.
    grmbl

    Thanks for the link Tom, I’ll look into that. Looks promising :)

  8. Tom Albers April 15th, 2008 at 22:42

    Kitchensync in the last pim releases are based on opensync. In other words: kitchensync is a gui interface for msynctool now.

    But I agree, it should be integrated. But maybe with Akonadi that can be done.

  9. FACORAT Fabrice April 16th, 2008 at 00:14

    If you were trying to to sync with mandriva 2008.0, it’s somewhat normal it was not working because Mandriva was using the dev version of OpenSync ( 0..x ) which was incorrect because this version is not working at all with kdepim.

    That’s why for 2008.1 Spring they switch back to the stable opensyc release, and greatly improved synchronization.
    see this for furthers infos and for a video tuto/demo :
    http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2008.1_Tour#Easy_synchronization_with_Windows_Mobile_5_.2F_6_and_other_mobile_devices

  10. Tom Albers April 16th, 2008 at 11:43

    I upgraded to spring edition because I had the feeling it would have solved the problem, reading the announcement. When that also did not work ( believe me I spend a lot of time on it ), I switched to OpenSUSE.