Personal information management under Linux

Replies:

Parents:

  • None.
I have been standing a few (probably too many actually) hours trying to
find a good PIM package for Linux.

I recently changed jobs/projects and felt the need of having a
well-organized calendar, todo list, etc. My only real requirement was
that I could synchronize this information with my Palm Pilot. Timezone
support would be cool too.

I learnt a lot of things from that: now I know why Gnome can be useful,
and I also realized that in that area Linux is far behind Windows.

For a long time, I couldn't see what people where getting out of Gnome,
except a nice menu. I never wanted to install it because I didn't need
any of the Gnome applications, so the Gnome panel was just a heavy way
to launch programs to me.

When I started looking for a calendar application, an address book, I
finally discovered that Gnome was a whole suite of applications
interacting with each other. Well, I actually kind of knew that already
but never needed any of them. The problem is that you apparently cannot
have the set of applications without the panel that I don't want... This
is not the case with KDE.

I found different solutions:

Gnome[0] based: Gnomecal + Gnomecard + Gnome-Pilot
 - Gnomecard[1] is pretty cool.
 - Gnomecal[1] is not bad either, but there is no support for the
   timezones.
 - Gnome-Pilot[2] enables syncing with those two applications, backup,
   etc.

 The problem is that in order to run Gnome-Pilot, you need Gnome-Panel,
 even if the Helix packages do not mention this dependency. So it is
 kind of heavy for an address book and a calendar. Moreover, I failed
 to synchronize my Pilot database with Gnomecal.

KDE[3] based: KOrganizer + Abbrowser + KPilot
 - KOrganizer[4] is ok, but doesn't look as cool as Gnomecal.
 - Abbrowser[5] isn't as good as Gnomecard either.
 - KPilot[6] is supposed to allow synchronization with those two
   applications, but I didn't try it.

 With the KDE solution, you just need the KDE libs, and not the KDE
 desktop, which is nice. However, I liked the Gnome solution better.
 KOrganizer asks about the timezone you are in, but it is not possible
 to specify the timezone of the events...

There is also an X11 application, Plan[7], which supports todo's and
events. And there are scripts to synchronize with the Pilot datebook,
but it doesn't support timezones either, and I would be forced to use
another solution for the address book.

Therefore I decided to stay with my current setup: JPilot[8] is limited
(the interface could be better, the calendar suffer from the limitations
of the Palm ones, e.g. no timezone support), but it works and it's
lightweight.

I also was looking for some kind of log book too, and found out that
Emacs's changelog mode[9] (C-x 4 a in Emacs) works pretty well for me.

So the result of this is that Linux is missing a few good PIM
applications. I guess that the Gnome ones will eventually be a good
solution, but you have to be ready to switch to Gnome for more or less
everything. Maybe KOrganizer will get better, too.

But for right now, I think that Windows is far ahead of Linux. For
example, just the standard Palm Desktop you get with the Palm is pretty
good.

 0. http://www.gnome.org/
 1. http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/gnome-pim.shtml
 2. http://www.gnome.org/gnome-pilot/
 3. http://www.kde.org/
 4. http://devel-home.kde.org/~korganiz/
 5. http://apps.kde.com/infofr.php?id=548
 6. http://www.slac.com/pilone/kpilot_home/
 7. http://me.in-berlin.de/~bitrot/plan.html
 8. http://www.jpilot.com/
 9. http://www.gnu.org/manual/emacs/html_node/emacs_264.html

--
Hugo Haas <[email protected]> - http://larve.net/people/hugo/
No Kitty that's a bad Kitty!

Re: Personal information management under Linux

Replies:

Parents:

Hugo Haas wrote:
>
> I have been standing a few (probably too many actually) hours trying to
> find a good PIM package for Linux.
>

> There is also an X11 application, Plan[7], which supports todo's and
> events. And there are scripts to synchronize with the Pilot datebook,
> but it doesn't support timezones either, and I would be forced to use
> another solution for the address book.

I think Philippe Le Hegaret may have written something to work
with Plan for timezone support.

- Ian

--
Ian Jacobs ([email protected])   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel:                         +1 831 457-2842
Cell:                        +1 917 450-8783

Re: Personal information management under Linux

Replies:

  • None.

Parents:

On Sun, Nov 12, 2000, Ian Jacobs wrote:
> > There is also an X11 application, Plan[7], which supports todo's and
> > events. And there are scripts to synchronize with the Pilot datebook,
> > but it doesn't support timezones either, and I would be forced to use
> > another solution for the address book.
>
> I think Philippe Le Hegaret may have written something to work
> with Plan for timezone support.

Yes, that is true that Philippe is working on that. He is pretty close
to having this done. That won't solve my addressbook problem though. :-)

But yes, maybe I'll switch to plan at that point.

--
Hugo Haas <[email protected]> - http://larve.net/people/hugo/
What kind of side dishes will we be enjoying this evening with our
frozen waffles?

Re: Personal information management under Linux

Replies:

  • None.

Parents:

On Sat, Nov 11, 2000, Hugo Haas wrote:
> There is also an X11 application, Plan[7], which supports todo's and
> events. And there are scripts to synchronize with the Pilot datebook,
> but it doesn't support timezones either, and I would be forced to use
> another solution for the address book.

I wanted to give Plan another chance because a lot of people use it. It
is actually pretty cool.

It is a calendar which supports different kinds of alarms (it can for
example send emails to remind you of something). But it starts to be
very interesting because it has a daemon (netplan) which manages the
agenda.

I have a client running at home, one at work, plus PilotManager[10]
which synchronizes it with my Pilot. I can use the three clients at the
same time, get my calendar using an SSH tunnel from my laptop wherever I
am. I really like that.

Moreover, PilotManager has conduits to synchronize a lot of other
things. It can for example dump the main database as XML[11] and then
run some XSLT on it, etc.

So PilotManager + Plan is a good option. I will play with the XML stuff
soon.

>   7. http://me.in-berlin.de/~bitrot/plan.html
 10. http://www.moshpit.org/pilotmgr/
 11. http://www.sun.com/software/xml/developers/palm/

--
Hugo Haas <[email protected]> - http://larve.net/people/hugo/
It might look like I'm doing nothing, but at the cellular level I'm
really quite busy.

HURL: fogo mailing list archives, maintained by Gerald Oskoboiny