December 8
Mashing Google Calendar and GNOME
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
[...] że nie wpadłem na rozwiązanie samodzielnie, tylko ściągnąłem je z wpisu “Mashing Google Calendar and GNOME” na blogu Bryana [...]
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 @)
thanks
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.
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
Excellent guide, works like charm on ubuntu hardy
With address clear, but where/how can i get this nice styles for calender.
I used Drale’s method after failing at the command line, and it worked a treat on Ubuntu Hardy, very simple. Thanks!
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..
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.
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.
I just tried the built in Google calendar support and it worked great! That is so much easier
[...] 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 [...]