For a little bit i had been contemplating implementing a solution to synchronize the data on my NokiaE61i (being contacts, calendars and such) with the Lightning calendar on Thunderbird.

After bashing my head for a few days trying to get blueZync to run correctly and realizing that ScheduleWorld/GoogleCalendar/GnomeCalendar, it’s a bit of a long loop for my private data, made my mind to make a switch i had been thinking of. Evolution.
And also because the latest versions of Thunderbird , which i had carried on using from the Windows days, ate RAM like it had to.

Evolution has a relatively intuitive interface for both Thunderbird, and even Outlook users.
A really nice calendar and a good contact manager. It’s just good software. Period.

It comes preinstalled in the standard distribution of Ubuntu so the only thing to do was set my accounts up on it. The explanation of that goes beyond the scope of this post.

The crucial piece of software needed for this is Multisync.
So add the repos in the source list /etc/apt/sources.lst :

deb http://opensync.gforge.punktart.de/repo/opensync-0.21/ feisty main
deb-src http://opensync.gforge.punktart.de/repo/opensync-0.21/ feisty main

I’m currently doing this on Hardy, but this seems to be the latest available, and it works fine actually.
For the repository key , proceed as following:

gpg --keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net/ --recv-keys CB210090B029CB84
gpg --export CB210090B029CB84 | sudo apt-key add -

Finally, install the required software:

sudo aptitude install libopensync-plugin-* libopensync0 opensyncutils msynctool mulstisync-qad bluez-passkey-gnome bluez-gnome

Now msynctool needs some configuration:

msynctool --addgroup e61i
msynctool --addmember e61i evo2-sync
msynctool --addmember e61i syncml-obex-client

Use hcitool to find the MAC address of the bluetooth device of the phone itself.
Here’s mine.


hcitool scan
Scanning ...
00:17:E5:XX:XX:XX Sid's nokia

Now the two installed plugins need some final configuration.

msynctool --configure e61i 1

And this is what the content of that file needs to be:

http://pastebin.com/f3e6e708a

The other plugin:

msynctool --configure e61i 2

in my case has the following configuration:

http://pastebin.com/f7df629f8

At the very end:

msynctool --sync nokia

Or you can user the Multisync-qad application we installed (/usr/bin/multisync0.90).