Thursday, 15 November 2007
GCal & Lightning/Thunderbird
I'm the kind of guy who adopted linux as my primary desktop years ago. I've been lucky enough to use it at work exclusively for almost two years, and I've used it at home exclusively for five or six years. Windows actually feels really strange to me now. One issue that has been a big pain at work was calendar support. Finally I think I've found something that makes me happy: I'm using Thunderbird with Lightning and the Provider for Google Calendar. A good write up on setting this up is here.
Finally I think I have a good setup that meets all my needs. First of all, my Calendar has to live in my email program, so I can get meeting invitations and hit "accept" and it's on my calendar. There are a lot of email programs for linux that I don't like, so this was a limiting factor for a while. I need one with good support for multiple mailboxes and lots of features. I also want to be able to get to my calendar from anywhere. I use a VPN at home a lot to read my email as I somewhat dislike webmail. I want to not care which box I'm "accepting" the meeting message on. Also, I want to have a browser bookmark to my calendar or be able to navigate to it from somebody else's browser if I don't have my computer.
I actually think this combination has advantages over Outlook (besides being open source and working on any operating system). GCal and Lighning finally solve my calendar issue, so I can cross one of my biggest annoyances off my list. Now if I could just get an open source driver for my ATI graphics card, I'd be very happy.
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