Orage revisited

Way back in 2007 I wrote a fairly simple script to download a google calendar file in ics format and stuff it into the Orage, a desktop calendar application bundled with the xfce window manager that came with xubuntu.

I did it just to see how easy it was to do. Nothing more.

Even though a year or so on I started using a ppc imac with Xubuntu as my principal desktop machine, I didn't really invest a lot of effort in the script, even though some people at the time found it useful, preferring to use evolution to handle mail and calendar type stuff.

Fast forward to 2017:

For no good reason other than it was the day after Xmas I decided to see if I could get jpilot to import a google calendar file with a bit of handwritten code to convert the ics file to a basic palm compatible csv file.

Well I havn't yet got as far as doing the csv conversion bit as I found my orage download script didn't work any more.

Orage now keeps its ics file in ./local/share/orage and google's calendar file syntax has changed.

So I fixed it:

touch ~/calendar/basic.ics
date >> ~/calendar/google_download.log
while test ! -s ~/calendar/basic.ics
do
wget -rK -nH \

  https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/yourprivateicsfile.ics \ 

  -O ~/calendar/basic.ics -a ~/calendar/google_download.log
sleep 30
done
if test -s ~/calendar/basic.ics
then
mv ~/.local/share/orage/orage.ics ~/.local/share/orage/orage_old.ics
mv ~/calendar/basic.ics ~/.local/share/orage/orage.ics
fi

Obviously you replace yourprivateicsfile.ics with the link to your private google calendar ics file. If you are unsure how to find this check out this google help page - the bit you want is titled 'See your calendar...".

I've also spread the wget command over three lines for improved readibility. Depending on the unix shell you are using you may need to get rid of the backslashes and turn it back into a single very long line to get it to execute

wget now whinges about the combination of command line options but you can cheerfully ignore that (or fix it if you want)...