December 8

Mashing Google Calendar and GNOME

Posted by Bryan Clark
Filed under GNOME | 19 Comments

I never used to be much of a calendar person, usually I’m late to everything and never know if I’m free for a weekend or not. But since Google calendar came out I started using it pretty regularly and I think it’s actually improved my ability to be punctual and organized… well probably not, but anyway.



My Google Calendar

One major benefit I find to using this calendar versus one on my local system is that I can have GNOME import my calendar locally via the iCal and still access and use the calendar via the web interface any other time.

To set it up I went to the manage calendar page for my personal calendar. I had to right click copy the link location since they don’t give the iCal link in webcal: url format. Then open a terminal and type this, replacing $URL with the url you copied for your iCal.

/usr/libexec/evolution-webcal $URL



My Personal Calendar Manage Page

And that’s about it, the little webcal dialog will ask you silly questions about your web calendar settings and it’s imported into evolution-data-server. I don’t even use evolution anymore, but the calendar portion works just the same. I only ever view my calendar out of the calendar widget, all my updates and additions are done in Google calendar.



My Calendar Widget

This entry was posted on Friday, December 8th, 2006 at 11:37 am and is filed under GNOME. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

19 Responses to “Mashing Google Calendar and GNOME”

  1. Kalendarz Google na pulpicie Gnome : silva rerum on May 17th, 2007 at 8:48 am

    [...] że nie wpadłem na rozwiązanie samodzielnie, tylko ściągnąłem je z wpisu “Mashing Google Calendar and GNOME” na blogu Bryana [...]

  2. Daniel van Gerpen on June 10th, 2007 at 4:35 am

    I tried to do follow this guide but it did not work, I could not even download the my private ical basic.ics file with wget.

    After a while I figured out the problem:

    My account name includes “@googlemail.com” as does the ical link. If I replace this with “@gmail.com” it suddenly started work :-)

  3. drale on July 13th, 2007 at 10:50 pm

    libexec didn’t exist for me
    I tried ‘/usr/lib/evolution-webcal $url’ and just ‘evolution-webcal $url’ but it didn’t work either.
    The description of evoltuion-webcal says “It allows you to subscribe to a published calendar simply by clicking on a webcal: URL.” debian.org
    So with evolution-webcal installed I copy pasted the link into my address bar and change the ‘http:’ to ‘webcal:’ and that worked.
    I have Ubuntu Feisty

  4. Bryan Clark on July 23rd, 2007 at 10:55 am

    drale: in another article, Google Calendar, Meet Ubuntu Britt says the Ubuntu location would be: /usr/lib/evolution-webcal/evolution-webcal $GOOGLE_ICAL_URL However your solution seems to avoid the command line and probably works for any distro with the package installed, perhaps I should update the post to reflect that.

  5. Philip on September 1st, 2007 at 3:17 am

    Sounds nice that (one-)way. Also very easy with iCal. But: How about subsricing to an ical (placed at icalx.com or other domains) using GoogleCalendar? This would be the easiest way to have both, your ical or whatsoever calendar and the online google one on a dynamic updated state.

  6. mattias on September 17th, 2007 at 4:20 pm

    hmm, I was hoping that the URL would support several schemas, not only http… I want to import from a local file, using the file:// schema, but nope, didnt work. I’ll have to test a bit more :)

    But thanks for the tip anyhow.

  7. Andrew Roazen on September 26th, 2007 at 6:56 pm

    Two points. Unless you configure Evolution, the calendar popup will use GMT times instead of your local time. Also, stress more that this is not a two-way solution because Evolution can’t send events to Google Calendar yet (not without installing a daemon which has to be configured for online or offline access).

  8. Len on February 2nd, 2008 at 6:03 am

    I got it working on a 64bit ubuntu, this is how I did it:

    /usr/lib64/evolution-webcal/evolution-webcal $URL

    Replace the $URL and make sure its a good url (replace %40 in the URL with @)

  9. toxa on April 14th, 2008 at 7:38 am

    thanks

  10. Tim on April 30th, 2008 at 10:24 am

    So anyone attempt this with Ubuntu Hardy? They have a new international clock in the Gnome Panel… I tried following Britt’s advice here http://lukewarmtapioca.com/2006/12/8/google-calendar-meet-ubuntu and the webcal library accepted it, but I did not get any dates to show in the calendar under the clock.

  11. Tim on April 30th, 2008 at 11:05 am

    I guess it would help if I had evolution-data-server installed, as that seems to be the hook between the webcal library and the gnome panel applet.

    All is well now, thanks for the information on your site :-)

  12. MeduZa on May 19th, 2008 at 11:16 am

    Excellent guide, works like charm on ubuntu hardy

  13. Khatia on June 1st, 2008 at 11:11 pm

    With address clear, but where/how can i get this nice styles for calender.

  14. Nathan on August 24th, 2008 at 6:18 am

    I used Drale’s method after failing at the command line, and it worked a treat on Ubuntu Hardy, very simple. Thanks!

  15. John The Bad on October 7th, 2008 at 5:47 am

    I have Ubuntu Hardy and I managed to add my Google Calendars to Evolution using webcal and the ical urls (minus ‘http://’). However, I can’t see these calendars on my calendar applet on the top panel which the only reason I added them to Evolution..

  16. Marko on May 29th, 2009 at 2:08 pm

    I’m using Ubuntu 9.04 – Jaunty and these are the things I had to do to make this work.

    1) evolution-webcal is located here: /usr/lib/evolution-webcal/evolution-webcal
    2) I had to start Evolution (which I’m not using) and manually edit the urls to remove “webcal://” from the beginning of every url I’ve added from the command line.

    After that, everything works as expected.

  17. Marko on June 2nd, 2009 at 6:25 pm

    The Evolution silently converts https:// to webcal:// . On the other side, I’ve noticed the Google in the list of supported calendars when adding a new one. It works perfectly.

  18. Bryan Clark on June 7th, 2009 at 1:54 pm

    I just tried the built in Google calendar support and it worked great! That is so much easier

  19. Day 4: Back to Work [Linux FTW] « Blog.amhill on August 14th, 2010 at 8:26 pm

    [...] was surprisingly easy. I googled “sync ubuntu evolution with google calendar” and found this site. His instructions may be a little antiquated because I had to adjust them [...]

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