Hi all, Following the recent discussions, I though that I would try the syncing method that people have been talking about (Funambol + syncevolution + genesis), to keep my evolution contacts + my phone's contacts in sync.
Experiences and notes follow. Note the Linux distro was Ubuntu, so some of the issues I ran into & instructions are specific to this distro, and the phone was a Nokia N95, so some of the issues I ran into may be specific to Nokia phones (but will probably apply to most Nokia E series and N series phones). == Other methods previously tried that did not work well enough == Prior to this I had tried a number of other method for doing this including: 1) Conduit, syncing contacts via gmail. Keep freezing trying to sync from evolution to gmail. Also has problems talking to phone over bluetooth (there are bugs in gnome's bugzilla for this, it's not feature-complete yet). 2) msynctool over bluetooth directly from evolution, as per: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=705103 . It worked, but kept stuffing things up (saying data had changed when it hadn't due to escaping characters to HTML entities and comparing the unescaped versus the escaped versions, and randomly inserting extra spaces - e.g. "Australia" became "Aust ralia"). I wanted exact syncing because I sometimes use the GPS in my phone to navigate to a contact's address when driving, and the address has to be exactly correct for this to work. I.e. address in evolution has to transfer completely correctly to the phone, which msynctool did not do. 3) Set up connection to Google contacts directly through evolution (as per: http://www.linux.com/feature/154875 ), and then syncing directly from the Nokia phone to gmail's contacts using the steps here: http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=98230&topic=15015 . However, this is buggy too (the address field get all mangled - I'm using separate fields for postcode/suburb/etc, and Google seemed to merge them into one big blob, which is not suitable because the GPS software could not parse this). I know Google's syncing is in beta, but for me it's not currently suitable. So, 1 out right failure, 2 "not good enough"s, giving 3 out of 3 for 100% overall failure rate. Not good. So I was fairly dubious about trying a fourth approach, but the level of positive comments on the list convinced my to give the funambol method a go. == Experience / Timeline == 4:30 start reading - what is my Funambol, can it sync to my phone (Nokia N95), can I sync evolution to Funambol? 4:34 reading - apparently need syncevolution to sync evolution to Funambol. 4:37 start sign-up at My.Funambol beta ( http://my.funambol.com ) 4:44 Did not get SMS (suspect problem was the leading zero in the phone number), starting manual funambol setup on phone. 4:51 completed setup of sync profile on phone, ran sync, gave error about wrong password (I had mistyped), corrected, repeated sync, ran successfully. 4:58 completed reading a bit more about syncevolution. Ran: "sudo aptitude install syncevolution". There's no such package in Ubuntu. Express annoyance about this.... 5:02 Some more googling - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SyncEvolution confirms that there are no packages. 5:03 I search for "genesis", since people have talked about this as a nice front-end to syncevolution, and hopefully that will include the syncevolution stuff.... however the "genesis" packages in Ubuntu are to do with an AI-neural net learning program ("general-purpose neural simulator") 5:15 Distracted for 12 minutes by a very large thunderstorm. 5:16 Googled for PPA genesis packages, since I have a rule that I won't install any software unless it's packaged (wasted too much time in my life doing this, won't do it any more). May have found some packages at: https://launchpad.net/~frederik-elwert/+archive/ppa 5:17 sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list , add the lines listed on the URL above. 5:18 sudo aptitude update 5:19 sudo aptitude install genesis-sync syncevolution 5:20 The above command does not work?! "The following packages have unmet dependencies: genesis-sync: Depends: syncevolution which is a virtual package." .. so looks like they have packaged genesis-sync, but not syncevolution. 5:22 Back to google: "site:launchpad.net syncevolution PPA". Find a PPA that only has 0.7, would like latest version to avoid bugs. 5:23 A general google, finds this page: http://www.estamos.de/blog/2008/10/11/binary-packages-for-evolution/ (which does not have links to the packages, but fortunately someone else already asked this question in the comments and got an answer). 5:25 Follow suggested link 5:26 sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list , add lines as per: http://www.estamos.de/download/apt/ 5:28 sudo aptitude install genesis-sync syncevolution 5:29 Whoops, need to do: sudo aptitude update first 5:30 redo: sudo aptitude install genesis-sync syncevolution 5:31 Yes, install the potentially untrusted packages. 5:33 Installation complete of both syncevolution and genesis-sync. 5:34 applications -> accessories -> genesis 5:35 click on the panel icon to setup genesis. Server name = "funambol", server template = "funambol"; next; enter username +password; next; tick address book, select contacts folder, click apply. 5:37 For some reason when I click on the panel icon again, it has forgotten the details entered above, so I renter the same information again. 5:38 I click synchronise on the panel icon, it runs, completes, says some contacts have been added. This looks promising. 5:39 I synchronise on my phone. Runs, completes, says some contacts have been added on the phone. This looks promising. 5:40 Explore on phone. == General comments == * This is not easy. Any attempt to pretend this is easy is incorrect. My grandma could not do this. My mother could not do this. Most normal people will simply not do this many steps. As soon as it requires using the command line, changing repositories, or anything like that, most normal people just won't do it. * This is not quick. Any attempt to pretend this is quick is incorrect. Most people will give up long before spending this much time (58 minutes in my case) on getting it to work. Especially when the other methods are buggy, it makes you far less inclined to spend the time seeing if yet another method works, since you start to suspect it's an intractable problem. * The main solution to the above 2 problems, so I can't emphasise this enough: Please please please add Ubuntu packages for syncevolution and genesis-sync to the standard repositories. From what I understand, Fedora gets this right, and has packages. If "aptitude install syncevolution genesis-sync" had worked out-of-the-box, it would have saved a LOT of time, and made it much easier. == Bugs == Having said all this, the Funambol method is still a little bit buggy / incomplete. I particularly notice this with addresses: * It doesn't seem to sync a contact's "other" address from evolution to the phone, as far as I can tell. In fact, it managed to delete an "other" address from one of my evolution contacts, probably after I modified the contact on the phone, and then the other address that I previously had in evolution ended up blank. I would personally prefer that syncing didn't delete my data :-) * If a contact has a home address in evolution, I sometimes seem to end up with both a straight "address" on the phone, and a "home address" (i.e. 2 addresses from 1). Then if I change the "home address", in evolution, the "home address" on the phone updates, but the "address" does not. ... but, if I delete the "address" on the phone, then the "home address" in evolution sometimes also gets deleted. So there's something odd going on here. * I have one contact that I edited multiple times on both the phone and in evolution, and then synced both (i.e. sync computer, sync phone, sync computer), so that it should all be in sync, but ended up with the address on the phone and the address on the computer out-of-sync (i.e. two different street addresses, yet syncing did not update either, and no warnings at either end about a conflict or being out-of-sync). It's hard to know where these problems originate from, since there are so many different bits of software involved, - at least 5 by my count: Evolution <-> SyncEvolution <-> Genesis <-> Funambol <-> Nokia's sync software on the phone; and presumably there could be problems at any stage of that chain. So some problems, but overall it seems to work, and it does work better than the other methods I have tried, and once it's running, it seems extremely easy to use, both on the phone and on the computer. == Short version for anyone else wanting to try this on Ubuntu == (Also on the web at: http://nickj.org/Nokia_N95#The_N95_and_Linux ) === Funambol + Nokia phone setup === Go to http://my.funambol.com/ and click "sign up", and follow the steps to set up a username and password. (I didn't give them my email password when they asked for this, and it still worked fine, and I don't see any reason why they should need my email password for syncing contacts, so up to you whether to give this info or not). Follow the instructions for setting up the phone. Instructions for me were as follows on the Nokia phone: 1. Go to Menu and choose Tools 2. Select Sync (on some devices this option is under Menu, Settings and then Connectivity) 3. Press Options, then New sync profile 4. Set Sync profile name: Funambol and press OK 5. Select Applications 6. Select Contacts 7. Set Include in sync: Yes 8. Set Remote database: card 9. Press Back 10. Select Calendar 11. Set Include in sync: Yes 12. Set Remote database: cal 13. Press Back twice 14. Select Connection settings 15. Set Server Version: 1.2 16. Set Data bearer: Internet 17. Set Access point: enter a working internet connection (if you don't have one, contact your mobile provider) 18. Set Host address: http://my.funambol.com/sync 19. Set Port: 80 20. Set User name: <Funambol username> 21. Set Password: <Funambol password> 22. Press Back to save the changes Should then have syncing of contacts with the phone. === Ubuntu desktop === On an Ubuntu desktop where you run evolution, do this to set up the third-party repositories + install the needed software + configure it: sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list ... and add these lines: # For genesis-sync packages, currently unauthenticated: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/frederik-elwert/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/frederik-elwert/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main # For syncevolution packages, currently unauthenticated: deb http://www.estamos.de/download/apt stable main ... then: sudo aptitude update sudo aptitude install genesis-sync syncevolution-evolution ... "yes" to the untrusted packages (up to you though). * Run Genesis: Applications -> Accessories -> Genesis. * Click on the genesis panel icon to setup genesis. Server name = "funambol", server template = "funambol"; next; enter username + password; next; tick address book, select desired contacts folder, click apply. * Click the genesis panel icon again to run the sync. * Once you're happy with this, if you want to have genesis available whenever you need it, right-click on the Genesis icon -> Preferences -> Tick "Launch Genesis on startup". Following the above steps, it's achievable to have 2-way syncing of a phone + evolution, from scratch, including installation/configuration/setup/running, within about 30 minutes. -- All the best, Nick. _______________________________________________ Evolution-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-list
