I recently bought a used N900 and I was unhappy with the state of syncing multiple google calendars to the N900. There is "Erminig-NG". However, it is still alpha-quality software and recently some users reported problems (possibly due to changes on the google side). So I started looking for alternatives..

Luckily, Syncevolution recently gained CalDAV/CardDAV support, which means we can use it to sync to google calendar without using a third-party SyncML server.

The following howto describes how to setup syncing the default calendar and another calendar to google.

BE WARNED: A mis-configuration may screw up your calendars and I will not take responsibility for this. Also: I have yet to figure out how to get Syncevolution to accept google's SSL certificate. For now, SSL certificate verification is disabled, which opens the doors to MITM attacks and synchronization should only be performed from trusted networks. Hopefully we will soon figure out how to get SSL working correctly.

Prerequisites:

Install syncevolution version 1.1.99.5-1 (earlier versions don't support CalDAV/CardDAV)

A) Synchronizing the Default Calendar:

This is really simple. On your N900 execute the following (as user, not root):

Disable SSL verfication by setting "SSLVerifyServer = 0" in ~/.config/syncevolution/default_google/peers/target-config/config.ini

Then perform the initial synchronization:
If this doesn't work, you can replace "slow" with "refresh-client", which will DELETE ALL ENTRIES ON THE N900 and copy all google entries to the N900.

After that, you can perform incremental synchronizations using


B) Synchronizing Other Calendars:

This is somewhat more complicated to setup and I am sure there is a better way. Assume you have a calendar called "Test" on your N900 which you would like to sync to a google calendar (other than your default calendar on google).

The following assumes that you have already setup synchronization of the default calendar, as described above.

First, get the calendar ID by going to the google calendar settings page. The ID is where it says "Calendar Address:", next to the ICAL/XML/HTML buttons. Here we assume the ID is

On your N900 execute the following (as user, not root):

This sets up a synchronization with the "test calendar" on google with the default calendar on the N900, which is not what we want. To get it to synchronize correctly do the following:

Then specify which calendar on the N900 should be used by editing the file test/sources/calendar/config.ini and setting
Note: You can list the available calendars on the N900 by running syncevolution without any parameters.

Disable SSL verfication by setting "SSLVerifyServer = 0" in ~/.config/syncevolution/test_google/peers/target-config/config.ini

Then perform the initial synchronization:
and after that do incremental syncs using
That's it . Now you can just run the sync commands as a cronjob and you are all set.

As mentioned above, I still haven't figured out how to get the SSL certificate verification working. I tried downloading a ca-cert-bundle and setting SSLServerCertificates in the config.ini file, as described here, but for some reason it doesn't seem to work.

THANKS A LOT!

I have just noticed a few minutes ago that there was a new version of syncevolution (frontend only?) on extras-devel.

I have updated it and re-sync'd my contacts (I only use it for that), and worked OK (I did not expect that, to say the truth

For now I'll continue using erminig-NG for the calendar, but when I have some time to experiment I'll try syncevolution.. so thanks again for this HOWTO

I'm glad you like it . Let me know if you have any problems or find out how to get SSL working correctly.

BTW: I just tested if repeating events work. I created an event that repeats weekly (for a specific number of occurrences ) and I see the event correctly on the N900 (including repetitions etc) and editing the event on the N900 works.

On the other hand, I created an event on google that repeats twice per week on Wed and Fri at a specific time. The event shows up correctly on the N900 but when editing it is says something like "Complex repetition, unable to edit" (for the repetition pattern, other things can be edited). Deleting the event on the N900 correctly deleted all instances of it on google calendar.

Hello.

Thanks a lot for this!! However, I'm trying to do this and i'm getting this error.

Uhm, it seems the template name is wrong, try "Google_Calendar" (without quotes) instead of "google-calendar" in the command line.

Hmmm, thanks but still:

Try this (all in a row) substituting your real username and password instead of "X"

This seemed to work!

Excuse me, as I did not understand that the \ meant line break not to be included in the code (facepalm).

Ok. Now, the N900 calendar didn't get test events I created on google calendar's web client.

I deleted all my calendars in N900 (except from N900 and Private, which can not be deleted) and repeated the sync refresh-client command, and now it works!

Used the syncEvolution app to daily set syncs!

Thanks a lot!

PS: Anyidea for birthdays? I have them set as all day events in gCal, but wanted to know if there is a more stilish way.

Well, my contribute stops here as I simply tried to solve shell errors but never used syncevolution, sorry!
The simplest way to get birthdays for me is setting the birth date of my contacts and they magically appear in my calendar
Glad to be helpful
Bye!

Haha, thank you very much for the help, nonetheless!