fucking the white bunny rabbit

This article will try to explain how to configure Zimbra calendar in Evolution, I get most of the informations from a Jesse Keating’s article with Google Calendar instead of Zimbra.

Few releases ago Evolutions had a specific Zimbra connector which is not needed today (and is not maintained anymore), because Caldav support in both end-points is enough stable to be used, the problem is that is not clear how to use it.

Open your Zimbra account and move to Calendar tab:

• right click on calendar then properties, you can see some information about the calendar
• click on “Share…”, you can change the visibility of the calendar, just if you want to share it with others. For your access default settings don’t need any change.
• On the bottom of the share window, you can find the addresses: ICS to access from Caldav or View to access via HTTP.

The ICS access is what we need: http://mailserver/home/user@domain/CalendarName/, depends on your configurations, sometimes you have to use http://mail.byte-code.com/dav/user@domain/CalendarName/ (with /dav instead of /home, you have to try with the browser). For my Byte-code colleague: use /dav/.

Now:

• Create a new calendar with Evolution
• Choose CalDav
• Choose a name and a color
• put http://mailserver/home/user@domain/CalendarName/ or  http://mailserver/dav/user@domain/CalendarName/ (don’t forget the lastest slash (‘/’))
• Check the SSL (if you use HTTPS)
• Put your username (only the usename) in the appropriate textfield

That’s all, it should be work fine.

I tested also meetings invitation from Zimbra to Evolution and vice-versa and works fine.

The only things that doesn’t work is then, from evolution to Zimbra is when you forward an appontment as ICalendar, Zimbra doesn’t recognize the format and don’t permit you to add to the calendar.

I hope I didn’t forget anything. Please feel free to report it in the comments.

Disclaimer/Story/whatever: I’m a fan of VOIP against IRC chatting and I’m trying to move the Italian community toward VOIP. I decided to write this article to help people to configure their Fedora Talk account (but of course, this article is general purpose ) (you can find some information on the official fedora Talk website)

Why VOIP? VOIP has pros and cons. On communication we get a lot of advantages: fluid discussion, lot of time saved, less typing, my brain while I have to moderate a IRC meeting, and so on. By the way VOIP is a pretty new technology and is not yet simple to use, crappy software, firewall issues are two of possible problems.

After a lot of time testing different account and software I found a possible combination that seems to work fine!

In Linux world we have basically two softwares: Ekiga and Twinkle. I used Ekiga for a while without great results. I though that twinkle was crappy, but after Paul Friedls told me it works fine, I tried and he was right! Despite Twinkle has an horrible – old 1999 style – Qt3 interface it’s faster and stable (and support pulseaudio!!).

Enabling VOIP account on Fedora Talk

Read here.

Configuring Twinkle with Fedora Talk account.

You can find the same informations on this useful video, made by Clint Savage.

When you start Twinkle first time, you can choose to use the wizard or the editor configuration.. Using the editor, you have to choose the name of the profile, then you arrive in a form to fill with information about the user (here the official guide).

In the User tab:

• Your name: insert your Fullname
• User name: your fedora username
• Domain: insert the domain, for fedora Talk use talk.fedoraproject.org
• Realm: leave blank
• Authentication name: use your fedora username
• Password: use your fedora voip password that’s different between your FAS password, you will find in your Voip FAS section informations

In the SIP server tab:

• Registrar: talk.fedoraproject.org

In the Presence tab, you can enable “publish availability on startup” (not sure is implemented in the fedora talk infrastructure)

Using

You can do some tests calling:

• 1001 (1001@talk.fedoraproject.org) that read you some sentences
• 1002 (1002@talk.fedoraproject.org) that’s a echo test service

For conferencing you can take a look here.

Troubleshooting

Here some information about some problems that con occurs:

Flash: Ensure flash and adobe s**t is not running before you start twinkle/ekiga or a call. If yes, you will not be able to use the audio device and (my proposed solution).

Microphone

Remember to enable the microphone. Some computers, in particular laptops have two input channels: mic and front mic (the jack mic and the embedded laptop mic respectively). To enable it you should use (i use and it works) alsamixer, but with pulseaudio when you launch it, you see only the pulseaudio channel. To see the below layer (ALSA layer) you have to use:

alsamixer -c 0

and, using TAB key go to Capture tab and modify input source from mic to front mic or vice versa. You can modify also input volume and other settings. enjoy!

Linux TAG: when .org meet .com., the most important opensource event in Europe.

Linux TAG is the first event I attended with Fedora project. My participation, this year was short, just the weekend, for the FUDCon.

As usually FUDCon was interesting and funny I met a lot of new people (the world is small but the people are many) and of course I don’t remember all their names

I arrived Friday night to – I discover the day after – Tegel Airport (instead of Schoenefeld) and I reach the other guys that were exactly in the same place of one year ago “en passant”, and of course Italian Restaurant.

The FUDCon was introduced by an interesting, as usually, keynote of Paul Frields then Barcamp sessions started. I wanted to present something but the schedule was decided the day before when I wasn’t yet arrived. Too bad.

I attended QA and git for hackers, fedoracommunity, Design for F12, Symboli 2.0 and Simon sessions talks.

I have to say thanks to Mairin to change the abits of people and bring us far from “en passant” (of course we need more woman). Sorry guys but I like to change restaurant sometimes

I also discovered why is not a good idea to say “I have a flickr account” to dutch people.

You can get some photos from my “yahoo photo” account.