i’ve seen GCALDaemon before but i never really paid any attention to it until i saw a lifehacker post that mentioned it could sync your google contacts with a local mail client. gcaldaemon is a java program that runs server locally on your box which acts as a middle man so you can pass messages from evolution (or any ical client) and google calendars.

installing gcaldaemon on linux is pretty straight forward, and the gcal-daemon.cfg config is well commented and easy to edit. the gcaldaemon site has a howto for setting up evolution to use gcaldaemon. there’s also a howto for accessing gmail contacts in thunderbird. i never did get the google contacts working in evolution but i do have the calendar sync working.

if you want a non-read only google calendar sync with evolution and you don’t want to install/configure gcaldaemon you could always just wait a little longer. it looks like evolution 2.21.1 will have native 2 way sync with google calendars using a new Gdata library. hopefully the library will also add support for contacts and email, not just calendars. oh, and other linux applications should be able to use the Gdata library also… i’m half tempted to go grab the svn version of evolution and compile it myself.

i think the PDU entry has something to do with me not being able to load my google contacts. didn’t search too hard on that error string, maybe i’ll play around with gcaldaemon again. right now i can live with read-only google calendars in evolution.

$ ./standalone-start.sh
INFO | GCALDaemon V1.0 beta 14 starting…
INFO | RSS/ATOM feed converter enabled.
INFO | Local time zone is Eastern Standard Time.
INFO | HTTP server disabled.
INFO | RSS/ATOM feed converter disabled.
INFO | Start listening file [myicsfile]…
INFO | File listener started successfully.
INFO | Offline file synchronization enabled.
INFO | LDAP server starting on port 9080…
INFO | LDAP server started successfully.
INFO | Gmail notifier disabled.
INFO | Sendmail service disabled.
INFO | Mail terminal disabled.
WARN | The PDU has been fully decoded but there are still bytes in the buffer.
INFO | File listener stopped.
INFO | LDAP server stopped.