Tuesday 16 January 2007

syncing orage with google calendar


This really came out of playing with Xubuntu on parallels, the VM server for the mac. Xubuntu is a lightweight window manager and comes with orage as a basic calendar application. The question is, how to sync it with google calendar - or more accurately how to set it up to provide an offline calendar service so that you can have a recent calendar available (I'm so taken with Xubuntu I'm thinking about using it on an old machine that's not online all the time)

The trick actually is incredibly simple - google gives you the unique url of you calendar. This is an ics format file. Orage reads ics format files as archive files.

The trick really is to do a

wget -nH -rK your_calendar_url

as a cron job and hey presto, you have as recent a copy of your calendar as your cron job is set up to run.

Of course calendar files are kind of big so you probably wouldn't like to do this too often over a slow link, but even so you could probably run it once a day even over dialup

9 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for this! works a treat..

Mike said...

Also loving xubuntu!

as a heavier(possibly more functional or at least convenient) alternative to this, just throwing this out there...
xubuntu ships with Thunderbird, using Thunderbird for Google Mail Client (using IMAP) is pretty slick.

You toss in the two extensions into Thunderbird ( 'Google Calendar Provider' and 'Lightning' ),

And you get an experience similar to that of Outlook/Exchange. You can enable a cached mode to the calander, though I haven't tried it yet, and you get full two way access to the calander from the client, as long as you use the private ics link.

dgm said...

following up on Mike's comment - all true but (a) I wrote the script over 2 years ago when things were a bit different and google sync didn't work that well and (b) it was a proof of principle - you can for example use the same script to grab a copy of google calendar to import into sun's java communication server

João Matos said...

tks!

Unknown said...

Simply great! Thanks!

john said...

this is great...Orage is much cleaner than Thunderbird or Evolution. Thanks.

john said...

this is great...Orage is much cleaner than Thunderbird or Evolution. Thanks.

John O'Connell said...

Yup, 2013, and this is *still* the neatest, cleanest option. Many thanks. Obvious really :-)

Andi said...

I found this too: https://aymanbagabas.com/2018/04/08/sync-google-calendar.html