Get organised!
Nick Peers reveals how Linux can help bring some order to your increasingly chaotic life using standard desktop tools.
Nick Peers reveals how Linux can help bring some order to your increasingly chaotic life using the standard desktop calendar tools.
Modern life is hectic, and keeping on top of where you’re supposed to be or whose birthday is coming up can be almost impossible without the help of a calendar. If you’re currently relying on a paper calendar scrawled with notes hanging in the kitchen, how about moving it into the digital sphere where it can be dynamically updated as circumstances change? Better still, set yourself a series of reminders and that crucial anniversary won’t creep up on you unawares.
In this tutorial we’ll take a close look at the default calendar app supplied in Ubuntu, but we’ll also go further and examine several more powerful alternatives, including options that can be integrated directly with your email and contacts, making it easier to organise
meetings and integrate invitations from other people into your own calendar too. As you’d expect, a calendar app provides similar functionality to the paper calendar on your wall. Use it to record all kinds of forthcoming ‘events’, from the personal (birthdays, holidays, doctor’s appointments and so on) to the professional (meetings, deadlines and more). The app offers several key advantages: one, you can record as much information as you like, switching view from weekly to monthly as required for a detailed look at the day ahead or for an overview. Secondly, you can attach reminders to events, ensuring they don’t sneak up on you. And thirdly, you can link in your desktop calendar with online services, enabling you to not only back up your calendar to the cloud, but also to keep it in sync across multiple devices.
All this core functionality is available with the built-in
GNOME Calendar app found in both Ubuntu and Linux Mint, among others. Simply type ‘Calendar’ into the launcher’s search box to find and launch it. The app launches into one of three views: Week, Month, Year. Use the tabs at the top to switch between them.
Let’s start in the Month view; the current month will be displayed, with today highlighted. You’ll see there’s a mini weather forecast spanning today and the following two days – more on that shortly. You’ll see < and > buttons at the top for navigating to the previous or following month. If you wanted to jump further ahead, switch to Year view, click on a month to select it and then switch back to Month view.
Multiple calendars
Any calendar app worth its salt supports multiple calendars, and GNOME Calendar is no exception. Click the Calendar button at the top of the program window and you’ll see two calendars have been created by default: Birthdays & Anniversaries, and Personal. Use multiple calendars to categorise events however you choose – from basic division (work versus personal) to deeper levels of segregation (work meetings versus deadlines, for example). All calendars are displayed by default, each one colour-coded to help you identify what goes where. If this becomes too confusing you can temporarily hide individual calendars from view via the Calendar button by unticking them.
To set up additional offline calendars choose ‘Calendar Settings’. You’ll see both Birthdays & Anniversaries and Personal are listed here. Birthdays & Anniversaries is non-editable and is directly linked to
your contacts. Record a contact’s birthday using your contacts app and it’ll show up in Calendar too.
The Personal calendar is stored on your PC; to add more so-called ‘offline’ calendars, click ‘Add > New Local Calendar…’. Give it a name and provide it with a colour or shade from the 36 presets supplied, or click + to select your own – use the slider to move between colours, then click the square to choose a particular tint, or simply enter a hexadecimal code. Click Select to choose it, followed by Add.
You can also integrate online calendars too. Sadly, the manual Caldav option (‘Add > From Web…’) appears to be broken, but you can directly integrate Google, Nextcloud and Microsoft Exchange calendars. Click one to log into your account and give it access. Once done, any online calendars are added to the list – click one to change its name and assigned colour if necessary, to avoid clashing with existing calendars. Changes to these calendars are automatically synced back to the web.
You can also import calendars from other sources. Make sure they’re exported as an ICS file, then choose ‘Add > From File…’ to import them. Changes to these calendars are stored in the ICS file itself, so aren’t synced back to the original calendar. If you want more flexibility linking to online calendars, you’ll need to source an alternative calendar app – more on that later.
Add events
The simplest way to add a new event to Calendar is to click the day it occurs (or its start date if it’s a long event such as a holiday). A pop-up window enables you to quickly give your event a title and choose which calendar to assign it to. It’s set to ‘whole-day’ event for the current day if you click Add; for more options, click ‘Edit Details…’ and use the annotation (left) to guide you through what you can record. Keep an eye out for the speaker button next to a notification; by default it’s muted, but click the button to unmute it and you’ll receive an audio prompt alongside the pop-up.
Once entered, your event will appear marked on the calendar. If you’re in Week view, you’ll see it’s marked according to its start and end times on the day it occurs. In Month view its title appears next to the start time, colour-coded to help you identify which calendar it’s been stored in. Roll over it for a more detailed summary; click it to edit its details if necessary.
Finally, Year view simply places a dot beneath each day with an event marked on it. Click the day to review a summary of any events in the right-hand pane. Again, roll over an event for a summary, click to change it.
More navigation tools
You’ll notice a search button on the main GNOME
Calendar window: click this to perform keyword searches across all your linked calendars. Note that only those calendars marked as visible will be searched. Results appear in a drop-down menu: the event name, time and date, plus an alarm clock if any reminders have been set. Click a result to open it.
Click the hamburger ( ) button to reveal a Synchronise option to manually sync calendars where required, plus a Weather button where you can switch the three-day forecast on or off and also change location. Flick the Automatic Location switch off and start typing a place name to select an exact match from a dropdown menu to use that instead.
When you close GNOME Calendar, any upcoming events can easily be viewed by clicking the date on the desktop panel – a pop-up calendar will appear listing the day’s events. Click a day with a dot beneath it and you’ll be able to view events for that day. Roll your
mouse over one to clear it from the list with a single click – note that the original event isn’t deleted.
The built-in calendar is a good starting point, but it does lack features found in other third-party calendars. One obvious alternative is Korganizer, the default calendar for the KDE desktop. Install it through the Ubuntu Software Centre and you’ll find it offers more than just a simple calendar – there’s a to-do list and journal too. Its main window is multi-paned, combining the current month with a customisable view on the right. Agenda is the equivalent of GNOME Calendar’s
Week view, but there’s also Day and Month views as well as a handy Timeline, which lists all upcoming events in chronological order.
Creating new events is a more feature-rich experience too, with a multi-tabbed window enabling you to record everything you can in GNOME Calendar, but also to add attendees, resources and file attachments, plus add tags to help organise your upcoming events.
Again, Korganizer links to the Birthdays & Appointments calendar from your contacts and provides a single offline calendar (Personal) by default – this is separate to GNOME Calendar’s. To add more calendars, right-click inside the calendar list pane and choose ‘Add Calendar’. You’ll see direct support for Google accounts as well as Facebook events, plus various other business-friendly options and the ability to load data from an ical file or folder.
Choose the ical file or folder option if you’re creating a new calendar from scratch – type the full path and name into the Filename box (such as /home/nick/ Documents/filename), give it a different title if necessary and click OK.
Right-click an existing calendar for additional options such as making it the default calendar for new events, or to choose a different colour scheme.
Link email and calendar
Calendars tend to have close relationships with your email client, which is why another approach might be to tie them all together in a single app. Thunderbird users can do this by simply installing the Lightning add-in within Thunderbird itself: click the menu button and choose ‘Add-ons > Add-ons’ to open the Add-ons Manager. Click ‘Learn more’ to access the add-ons site, then select Lightning from the Most Popular list and click ‘Add to Thunderbird’, choosing ‘Install Now > Restart Now’ when prompted.
After Thunderbird restarts, you’ll see a new calendar pane appear on the right with two buttons above it – click the left-hand one to open the main Calendar tab. As with Korganizer, you’re presented with a multi-pane window, with four different views available in the middle pane: Day, Week and Month are as you’d expect, while Multiweek provides you with a four-week view.
To add an event, simply double-click a day and fill in the multi-tabbed dialogue box. It’s all straightforward – you can attach a priority level to the event and set its status as tentative, confirmed or cancelled. You’ll also see options for inviting other people to the event, which is where Lightning’s integration into Thunderbird comes into play. The step-by-step guide (right) reveals how easy it is to use Lightning to not just set up a meeting, but also select attendees, send out invitation emails and collate the responses.
On the right is a dedicated tasks pane for recording quick to-do lists. Simply type your task’s title into the ‘Click here to add a new task’ and hit Return to create it, then double-click it to open the Edit Task window where you can assign it a category, record a location, assign a due date or time – basically just about anything you can assign to a regular event.
Tasks appear in the right-hand task pane where you can mark them completed simply by ticking them. They’ll immediately vanish from the list unless you tick the ‘Show completed Tasks’ box to make yourself feel better about your rapidly expanding to-do list.
As with Korganizer, you can view and add new calendars from the left-hand pane by right-clicking –
in this case choose New Calendar. You have a choice of ‘On My Computer’ for standard offline calendars – you’ll see you can link it to one of your configured email addresses for the purpose of setting up meetings – or choose ‘On the Network’ to link up manually with an ICS, CALDAV or Sun Java System Calendar Server. Enter the URL into the Location box, name your calendar and choose its colour scheme and then provide any user credentials required to log on. Once created, double-click a calendar’s entry in the list to edit its properties; for example, network calendars are set to refresh every 30 minutes, but you can change this from here if you like.
If you’d like to integrate cloud accounts into the Lightning calendar, you’ll need to employ the services of third-party tools. Open the Add-ons Manager and click ‘Learn more’ to access the main store, then browse to the ‘Calendar and Date/time’ section. Google users should install ‘Provider for Google Calendar’; once in place, go to ‘New Calendar > On the Network’ where you’ll find a Google option that allows you to link your Google calendar(s) to Lightning.
To add a range of cloud-based accounts, install Tbsync followed by ‘Provider for Exchange Activesync’. Once installed, open the menu and choose ‘Add-ons > Tbsync’ to open its account manager. Click ‘Account actions > Add new account > Exchange Activesync’ to set up your chosen account.
This option supports a wide range of services, including free Microsoft live.com accounts – just make sure you select ‘Custom configuration’ to manually enter the server address. For example, this would be m.hotmail.com for those with Hotmail email addresses (get with the times, granddad – Ed).
Thunderbird and Lightning make an effective combo, but if you’re switching from a more business-like service such as Outlook, check out the box on page 62 for a pro-friendly alternative.