standalone calendar application - sunbird dead and no replacement in sight

English Applications
1

In short, I cannot find a suitable calendar application for my needs, for the following reasons

a) I need a calendar I can synchronize easily with several services outside google (memotoo, doodle)
b) lightning would theoretically work, but as can be seen easily in many fora, it slows down thunderbird to a degree that is unacceptable, even on a recent machine with lots of RAM
c) up to the last update, I quite happily used sunbird: it did all the right things, did not slow down my machine and was generally perfect - however since the upgrade to 12.3 it no longer works ("(crashreporter:10449): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_widget_set_sensitive: assertion `GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)’ failed" - I am unable to debug that)

Curiously, there seems to be absolutely no replacement. I have looked at evolution, but it wants to take over all of my life, and also does not seem to synchronize with memotoo. And kdepim seems equally huge and not promising at all.

Why could there not be a nice clean standalone thing such as sunbird was, and in fact still is?

Thanks for any suggestions!

2

On 03/29/2013 01:26 PM, wolfgangcr wrote:
> Curiously, there seems to be absolutely no replacement…
>Thanks for any suggestions!.

how about if ‘they’ just fixed for you what used to work??
which ‘they’ can’t do until it is in bugzilla…is it?

have you entered a bug on this problem, or added to one which already
exists? http://tinyurl.com/nzhq7j

–
dd

3

yes I should have mentioned that.

The thunderbird/lightning problem has been known forever and absolutely nobody even seems to try and solve it (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=733039)

For sunbird, one can’t file a bug report (I would think) because it has been officially unsupported for several years now … pointing at lightning as “the” solution (which it sort of is, but just does not perform in an acceptable way).

But I would believe that sunbird could be fixed, I just don’t know how. My hope is that somebody would see the interest to revitalise it as a standalone application, it should not be difficult for a real programmer.

4

On 03/29/2013 02:26 PM, wolfgangcr wrote:
> officially unsupported for several years now

ah! i see i should have remained silent… (and you do need to move
on…try all that are available and hope for the best…)

i solved my problem by making sure Google always knows what i have
planned–its a good thing that they “Never do wrong” :frowning:

in other words: i know there are other opinions needing service.

used to in the old dayz i had a little thing in my pocket i could
keep my future plans on…it was on a thing they used to call ‘paper’
it was quaint thing, we called it ‘calendar’ and we could change it
and keep it updated no matter where you were–and even with no
connectivity to the net, or electricity/battery power…

crude, but it worked.

–
dd

5

Try ReminderFox . It is cool https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/reminderfox/

6

thanks, but that does not seem like an application comparable to sunbird or lightning. With these, you have a local full calendar, which is synchronised against a good independent provider (memotoo) as well as against doodle which has become a necessity for me.

Would anyone have an idea how to get around the sunbird crash error message:

(crashreporter:4357): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_widget_set_sensitive: assertion `GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)’ failed

Cheers

7

It(ReminderFox) supports webdav synchronisation and memotoo also supports webdav. My Files - Access your files through a Web Folder (WebDAV)

8

thanks, but it is not a calendar really.

I am still surprised that this question releases so little interest in the community. I honestly think that having a basic functional calendar on a computer, and syncing that to something else than just google or apple, would be a function many people want.

Am I asking the question in the wrong way? Should we just all go and sell our lives to the marketing strategies of the 2-3 big players in the market who try to map every move we take in order to make sure we get the advertisements they want (and no other information)?

9

On 03/31/2013 06:56 PM, wolfgangcr wrote:
> Should we just all go and
> sell our lives to the marketing strategies of the 2-3 big players in the
> market who try to map every move we take in order to make sure we get
> the advertisements they want (and no other information)?

i get a lot of other information…like, where is the nearest coffee
shop…book shop…a map to get me there and probably a collection of
reviews of the coffee, ambience etc etc etc…

ymmv, so do not be surprised if there is “so little interest in
the community” just because there might be so many with different
interest than your own.

personally i can’t imagine spending five minutes trying to figure out
how to get all that information (or a calendar available world wide)
without using “the 2-3 big players”…which by the way i am REAL
happy with the money i have made off of Google, Microsoft and Apple
stock in the past few years…

–
dd

10

it would be interesting to discuss this, but off-topic (sorry for raising the issue).

So nobody has any suggestion for getting a working calendar on my system, given the wish list stated above?

Ideally by revitalizing the sunbird project, or at least by fixing the single bug that seems to be prohibiting its use for me. Or else by fixing the widely recognized thunderbird/lightning problem.

11

On 2013-03-31 20:36, wolfgangcr wrote:
> So nobody has any suggestion for getting a working calendar on my
> system, given the wish list stated above?

I don’t use any calendar, so although I read this thread to find out
what app you find to make a note of it, I can’t suggest anything.

I just have an application on my Nokia cell phone to remind me of
things. And it does not sync to anything at all.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)

12

Am 29.03.2013 13:26, schrieb wolfgangcr:
> b) lightning would theoretically work, but as can be seen easily in
> many fora, it slows down thunderbird to a degree that is unacceptable,
> even on a recent machine with lots of RAM

We all at home (2 PCs and 4 notebooks) here use Thunderbird with
Lightning ranging from old not powerful ones up to modern machines
(local calendars + google calendars) and on none of them I can see any
problem with the performance or other problems arising from it.

So what? Can you explain a little bit which (here nonexisting) problem
with Lightning should be solved?

–
PC: oS 12.3 x86_64 | i7-2600@3.40GHz | 16GB | KDE 4.10.0 | GTX 650 Ti
ThinkPad E320: oS 12.3 x86_64 | i3@2.30GHz | 8GB | KDE 4.10.0 | HD 3000
HannsBook: oS 12.3 x86_64 | SU4100@1.3GHz | 2GB | KDE 4.10.0 | GMA4500

13

this binary opens for me :open_mouth: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=sunbird-1.0b1&os=linux64&lang=en-US
http://paste.opensuse.org/images/10066910.png

14

yes it opens for me too, but as soon as I create an entry, it crashes with the error message I gave. It did not do this under 12.2 or any of the earlier opensuse distributions - but I cannot figure out what might have changed here.

Will be pleased to test any suggestions.

15

thanks for noting this. It seems, however, that quite a number of users experience this performance problem, such as indicated, for example, here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=733039.

I have searched quite a lot of fora about this, and have been unable to see a workable solution, nor a diagnosis why it would work for some people such as you, and not for others such as me.

16

Am 01.04.2013 11:36, schrieb wolfgangcr:
> here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=733039.
Did you really run into the same problem as the posters in this bug use
windows and one comment even explicitly says that the same problem does
not happen on a linux system.
I am far from saying that TB+Lightning is bugfree (which software is
it?), but if you had trouble we could try to figure out what your
trouble is (it can be something unrelated like tracker-miner or something).
But I see you focus on sunbird with which I have no experience so I stop
here.

–
PC: oS 12.3 x86_64 | i7-2600@3.40GHz | 16GB | KDE 4.10.0 | GTX 650 Ti
ThinkPad E320: oS 12.3 x86_64 | i3@2.30GHz | 8GB | KDE 4.10.0 | HD 3000
HannsBook: oS 12.3 x86_64 | SU4100@1.3GHz | 2GB | KDE 4.10.0 | GMA4500

17

Thanks, this was a useful hint indeed. I noticed performance problems with tracker-miner before (and had been appalled, like others, how a regular system upgrade could install something as wasteful as this seems to be). I have now thrown it out, and things seem to go more smoothly with lightning.

Perhaps sunbird therefore is no longer necessary - although I would still have preferred a standalone solution.

18

Sorry for late report but It doesn’t crash when i add a single entry or a repeating event

But it crashes when i edit events

**
GLib-GObject:ERROR:gobject.c:4141:g_weak_ref_set: assertion failed: (weak_locations != NULL)
./run-mozilla.sh: line 131: 9800 Aborted “$prog” ${1+“$@”}

19

Sunbird crashes for me too on OpenSUSE 12.3, so I tried running the Windows .exe under wine. Not a desirable solution, I know, but so far I have my stand-alone calendar back again. If you want to try this, just install Sunbird on your nearest windows platform, then copy the whole of the install folder to you Linux machine. This was easy for me, I have a dual boot of Win8 and OS12.3.

I did think of downloading the source and debugging it, but it is a dead-end really, so I will be looking for a Windows/Linux replacement soon. Like you, I prefer a stand-alone mail client.

20

You can use korganizer. It’s integrated in the kontact suite, but the integrated apps run fine as standalone as well. Yep, I know it will pull in a lot of KDE stuff and libraries, but we want full functionality, don’t we.