Korganizer & Google calendar

Submitted by nschloe on Wed, 11/02/2009
With the release of KDE 4.2 last months, KDE really made a huge leap ahead; it seems like all the hard work that developers were talking about on the mailing lists and forums for over two years finally establishes a fantastic piece of software, with new features rushing in daily.

However, one thing that always annoyed me was that I couldn't get Kontact/Korganizer to work with my Google calendar, something that should actually be working for ages. Today I figured out what the problem was and I'd like to share this in case you run into the same problem.

Note that the following only allows for read access, writing to the calendar fails with a nasty

An unexpected error (404) occurred while attempting to upload http://www.google.com:80/calendar/ical/[...]/basic.ics.

Now, for pure read access, here's what you need to do.

  1. Open Korganizer (or Kontact and go to the "Calendar" section) and make sure that you see the resources (KDE resources installed?). For this, go to Settings -> Sidebar -> Show Resource View.
  2. Don't see anything? Where's your sidebar? I might happen (in fact it did for me) that the sidebar is hidden right next to the calendar itself. To expand, click on the border

    Korganizer with collapsed calendar list: Korganizer with collapsed calendar list.

    and drag the thing to the right. Then you'll get access to the calendar list.

    Korganizer with expanded calendar list: Korganizer with expanded calendar list.

  3. Click on the '+' sign and add a "Calendar in Remote File".
  4. In the "Download from" and "Upload to" fields, you paste the URL that you get from Google the following way.
    1. Login to Google calendar.
    2. Click on "Settings" in the "my calendars" section to the left.
    3. Choose the calendar you would like to see in Kontact.
    4. On the bottom of the page, you see two green ICAL icons. If your calendar is private, choose the lower one, if it's public the upper. You'll get a */basic.ics address that you need to use in Kontact.
  5. Adjust the reload and save settings to your liking.

All done!

Tags: 
KDE

Comments

KOrganizer 3.5.9 (Debian Lenny)
I can load Google Calendar in my KOrganizer (private ical link), but when I create a new event, KOrganizer show me a 404 error!

Regards,
Renato

Submitted by Renato S. Yamane on Wed, 01/04/2009

Same with me. When trying to synchronize it shows me a 404 error. Having followed this tutorial I'm quite sure of the right private calendar adress and settings.

Submitted by Mika on Sun, 19/04/2009

Same problem here, can you write to your calendar?

Submitted by Damián on Tue, 28/04/2009

Same problem.

Submitted by nabla on Sat, 09/05/2009

yep got the same error. not sure if I can do in evolution though. 'ave to try, but like to use KORGz

Submitted by atze on Sat, 23/05/2009

same here..
any news?

Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 23/06/2009

did you guys even read his post? :) it says "read only", so no creation of new events.
anyway, it seems we are all waiting for the following feature request: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=133614
now go vote for it!

if you can't wait for it, you can temporarily use the gcaldaemon workaround.

Submitted by mxttie on Wed, 15/07/2009

Well I can sync from Google to Kontact and to my palm. Still waiting to see if someone figures out why we can't upload to Google.

Submitted by Guy on Thu, 10/09/2009

Korganiser companined that the url of the google cal didn't exist. I restarted Korganiser and all was fine.

I clicked the read-only tag but was able to upload events to google cal.

Thanks for the post.

Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 07/10/2009

You can now do this in KDE4.3. I tested this on the newest Mandriva release (2010.0). When you add a new calendar in Kontact, you have the option to add an Akanodi source. This is a new technology that acts as backend for PIM data sources. It does have Google Calendar type that allows not only read from but also write to Google Calendar.

Submitted by Sitor on Thu, 05/11/2009

It works with KDE 4.3 on OpenSuse 11.2, but I needed to restart Korganizer to connect to Google Cal.

Submitted by Wawrzek on Thu, 31/12/2009

Works perfect in combination with KDE 4.3.2 and Korganizer 4.3.2

Thanks Nico!

Submitted by Ronaldi on Sun, 10/01/2010

It works with KDE 4.3 on OpenSuse 11.2, but I needed to restart Korganizer to connect to Google Cal.

Submitted by Sohbet odalari on Sun, 21/03/2010

I don't see an add “Calendar in Remote File” in KDE 4.4.2 / Korganizer 4.4.2 (only three local options) on Lucid -- any idea if that needs to be added? Thanks!

Submitted by daisy on Mon, 10/05/2010

you need to install kdepim-kresources

Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 12/05/2010

The GCAL akonadi resource works well for the default calendar, but not for secondary calendars.
The remote calendar only works in readonly mode.

Submitted by Ingo Ratsdorf on Fri, 11/06/2010

Thanks for the post. Working fine for read only.

It is NOT an korganizer error, that the google calendar is read only.

Here is what google write about their calendar links:
"XML or iCalendar - Use these formats to view a read only version of your calendar from other applications."

Submitted by Jesper Saxtorph on Tue, 05/04/2011

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