Sync Gmail Contacts with Kontact

So I’m on a quest to get, well, everything on everything. I want everything in sync. Now that’s quite a project, so I’m taking little steps. What I’ve done today is to get my Gmail contacts to sync with my desktop contacts app, Kontact (in Kubuntu). I do all my email in Gmail, so it makes sense to me that I have that as the base point. I thought that if I could get my contacts onto the desktop, then I’ve got a place to then figure out how to get them onto my N95 later on.

What I used was a rather nifty piece of software called GCALDaemon. What this is designed to do is to sync Google Contacts and Google Calendars to, well, pretty much most things you can think of. And it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux (as it’s Java-based). Follow the detailed instructions, and then you can have both sync’d. I’ve got it working nicely fairly quickly. The only thing I can’t do yet, rather embarrassingly, is get the Daemon itself to run automatically on login. I’m going to hassle someone to help me out with this.

One gotcha is to make sure you are running Java 1.5 or higher as your default Java JRE, I missed this first time round.

And I found this thanks to the lovely people at Lifehacker.


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9 responses to “Sync Gmail Contacts with Kontact”

  1. Jack Avatar
    Jack

    Hey, can you email me (or post!) how you sync’d contacts between Gmail and Kontact?

    I’d appreciate it 🙂

    I have it all set up, up to the point of doing it in Kontact – I’m sure it isn’t hard!

  2. Jack Avatar
    Jack

    Hey, can you email me (or post!) how you sync’d contacts between Gmail and Kontact?

    I’d appreciate it 🙂

    I have it all set up, up to the point of doing it in Kontact – I’m sure it isn’t hard!

  3. Ralf Avatar
    Ralf

    Hey,
    if you create a symbolic link from your standalone-start.sh to a file in ~/.kde/Autostart/ for example:
    [code]
    ln -s /opt/GCALLDaemon/bin/standalone-start.sh ~/.kde/Autostart/gcaldaemon
    [/code]
    then it will start at every login

  4. Ralf Avatar
    Ralf

    Hey,
    if you create a symbolic link from your standalone-start.sh to a file in ~/.kde/Autostart/ for example:
    [code]
    ln -s /opt/GCALLDaemon/bin/standalone-start.sh ~/.kde/Autostart/gcaldaemon
    [/code]
    then it will start at every login

  5. admin Avatar
    admin

    Hi Ralf, that’s very useful, thank you for that!

  6. admin Avatar
    admin

    Hi Ralf, that’s very useful, thank you for that!

  7. Prasad Avatar
    Prasad

    Hey, I did not like standalone-start.sh starting on KDE load as it is kinda useless before knetworkmanager kicks in and starts my wireless. So here is what i did (you need to be root):

    mv /usr/bin/kontact /usr/bin/kontact-bin
    now create a shell script named kontact in /usr/bin
    ———snip———-
    #!/bin/sh
    /usr/local/sbin/GCALDaemon/bin/standalone-start.sh &
    /usr/bin/kontact-bin
    killall standalone-start.sh
    ———snip———-

    And now it works like a charm, GCALDaemon starts when I start kontact.

  8. Prasad Avatar
    Prasad

    Hey, I did not like standalone-start.sh starting on KDE load as it is kinda useless before knetworkmanager kicks in and starts my wireless. So here is what i did (you need to be root):

    mv /usr/bin/kontact /usr/bin/kontact-bin
    now create a shell script named kontact in /usr/bin
    ———snip———-
    #!/bin/sh
    /usr/local/sbin/GCALDaemon/bin/standalone-start.sh &
    /usr/bin/kontact-bin
    killall standalone-start.sh
    ———snip———-

    And now it works like a charm, GCALDaemon starts when I start kontact.

  9. José Avatar
    José

    you may want to add it to your startup process by adding a shortcut to it in ~/.kde/Autostart/

    http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/122054