Obfuscated Reality About my tryings and doings on KDE, Qt, Python and whatever life brings

The other day I was lucky to get my hands on and old, solid Nokia N900 device. As I'm very enthusiastic about ownCloud, and currently also coding a bit on the Contacts App, of course the first the I had to do, was to set up syncing ownCloud Calendar and Contacts. Unfortunately that involved getting my hands dirty with syncevolution. I have tried that before with different configurations and devices, but I have always caved in after battling with the huge amount of configuration options and files. It took me from 9 PM to 9 AM to get it to work, but now I do believe I've got it right. Still a little rough around the edges, but that I can always fix, ha As it involved editing a lot of files and running commands in a terminal window, I started with setting up an SSH server on the device. DuckDuckGo came to the rescue, and I found instructions on getting root access and connecting to the device over WiFi with SSH. Once you're logged into the device remember to change to the normal user account with the command 'su user' and go to the users home directory with 'cd'. In this example owncloud refers to the URL to the root of your onCloud installation e.g. http://example.com/owncloud, user is your login and password is - you guessed right - your password The default first calendar in onCloud is called default calendar. The space in the name is asking for trouble, so I created a new calendar and called it calendar. Easy to remember. First setup the sync to the ownCloud server:

syncevolution --configure \
             --template SyncEvolution \
             backend=CalDAV \
             --sync-property username=user \
             --sync-property password=password \
             --sync-property syncURL=owncloud/apps/calendar/caldav.php/calendars/user/calendar \
             --sync-property deviceId=n900 \
              consumerReady=0 \
             target-config@owncloud-calendar

Test to see if there is a connection to the server by listing the events:

syncevolution --print-items target-config@owncloud-calendar calendar

If you get any errors try to have a look at the access log for the webserver ownCloud uses and read the one syncevolution produces. It's very verbose to say the least. Next setup the connection to the calendar on the device:

syncevolution --configure \
              --template "SyncEvolution Client" \
              syncURL=local://@owncloud-calendar \
              evolutionsource=N900 \
              username= \
              password= \
              type=maemo-events \
              consumerReady=1 \
              owncloud-calendar calendar

The username and password fields are empty on purpose because the credentials for the server sync is used, but for some reason they have to be there. Now it's time to see if it works by running the first sync. It has to be run in slow mode the first time, and yes, it is really slow.

syncevolution --sync slow owncloud-calendar

Syncevolution is very picky on the validity of the data and I had a couple of disturbing error messages during the first sync, but everything seemed to work OK. For doing normal incremental sync run:

syncevolution owncloud-calendar

Of course you don't want to have to open a terminal everytime you want to sync, but I'll leave that as an excercise for the reader (Hint: look in the Resources section) Now for the Contacts. Set up the server sync:

syncevolution --configure \
              --template SyncEvolution \
              backend=CardDAV \
              --sync-property username=user \
              --sync-property password=password \
              --sync-property syncURL=owncloud/apps/contacts/carddav.php/addressbooks/user/default \
             --sync-property deviceId=n900 \
              consumerReady=0 \
              target-config@owncloud-contacts contacts

And again a test:

syncevolution --print-items target-config@owncloud-contacts contacts

Set up sync to the local address book:

syncevolution --configure \
              --template "SyncEvolution Client" \
              syncURL=local://@owncloud-contacts \
              evolutionsource=file:///home/user/.osso-abook/db \
              username= \
              password= \
              type=evolution-contacts \
              consumerReady=1 \
              owncloud-contacts contacts

Initial slow sync:

syncevolution --sync slow owncloud-contacts

And incremental sync:

syncevolution owncloud-contacts

Syncevolution saves the configuration in ~/.config/syncevolution, so if you mess something up, just run rm -rf ~/.config/syncevolution/* (yes, I have once tried to add an extra space when running a similar command...) This setup will likely also work on the Nokia N800 and N9 and possibly on other devices too. Update: I have made a follow-up on this post with a simplified and more correct configuation. Resources: Sync Maemo 5 / Nokia N900 How to synchronize your Nokia N900's calendar with any calendar accessible to evolution (also if you usually use Thunderbird Lightning, Korganizer, ...) [SyncEvolution] CalDAV/CardDAV backends available How to connect PC to my Nokia N900 over WIFI? Root Access