Kontact Mobile

Kontact Mobile is the product name of KDE Kontact on mobile platforms. The porting is done by the KDEPIM and KDE Mobile initiatives. Kontact Mobile is also a full Kolab Groupware Client. Check out the screenshots.

There are two platform we aim at first:

• Maemo5 (on the N900)
• Win CE 6.5 (on the HTC Touch Pro 2)

Information

The project is under heavy development at the moment - but we encourage people to test and feedback upon it.

Installation and Update

At the moment there is only an installable version for the N900 available

On the N900

Installation

We offer a one click installation file for N900 users. Simply click that link on your N900 browser and afterwards directly install Kontact mobile on your device (be sure you have good and affordable internet access when doing so).

You can find detailed, up-to-date instruction on how to install the current state on the N900 in this README

For testing purposes you should always use the UNSTABLE section. Do not use the other sections. We try to update the unstable section about once a week.

If you want to test a localized version, issue

root
apt-get update
apt-get install kde-l10n-de
apt-get upgrade

The above snippet will install the German (-de) translation.

Update

Use the command line to update. (At the moment the update does not work via the N900 program manager, we believe it has some subtle problems.)

Make sure to have the package rootsh installed, to be able to get administrator rights. Use the application X Terminal or a remote shell connection and enter the following to do the update

root
apt-get update
apt-get install kdepim-mobile
apt-get upgrade

(Technical background: 'apt-get upgrade' would not install new packages that kdepim-mobile might need. Only doing 'install kdepim-mobile' used to fail with some package sets because the dependencies were not tight enough. So it is better to do both 'install kdepim-mobile' and 'upgrade'.)

Note that you have to reboot the N900 or manually restart several services like akonadiserver in order to profit from changes in these underlying services. If you are testing, rebooting the phone before your next tests is strongly recommended.

Deinstallation

If installation happened only using the hildon application manager, you should be able to deinstall the same way.

When apt-get was used manually, you might have selected some additional packages for which you need apt-get to remove them again. Typically this will need

apt-get remove kdepim-mobile

You could find the following helpful to remove all the KDE related stuff.

apt-get remove libkdecore5 kdelibs5-data kdebase-runtime-data
apt-get autoremove

Check what is installed by using

dpkg -l | grep kde

. Everything that has an "ii" in the beginning of the line still is installed. Another attempt to see what is already installed from a KDE SC 4.x is

dpkg -l | grep -e "^.i.*4:4"

.

(Pay attention that other installations might use the KDE components, like libkok is used by freoffice.)

Clear the configuration

If you want to start over or remove the configuration of the KDE components completely, you need to deal with three places. First make sure that no kdepim related application is running anymore! Here are a number of commands to move the old files into a new backup directory 'dot.kde-20100728'.

cd
d=dot.kde-20100728
mkdir $d $d/dot.config 
mv .config/akonadi $d/dot.config
mkdir -p $d/dot.local/share
mv .local/share/akonadi $d/dot.local/share
mv .kde $d

Also, some resources (like unsent mails) can be found at ~/.local/share/local-mail, ~/.local/share/contacts, ~/.local/share/notes and ~/.local/share/.local-mail.directory .

There is one step that you might have to do after moving away (or deleting) the .kde directory. Some packages create a preset kdewallet.kwl file for the 'user', which you need to recreate. The script doing so usually can be rightfully called so by the user:

/var/lib/dpkg/info/kdebase-runtime.postinst

It basically does:

mkdir -p /home/user/.kde/share/apps/kwallet
cp /usr/share/kde4/apps/kwallet/kdewallet.kwl /home/user/.kde/share/apps/kwallet

Other devices

At the moment no other devices are supported. Please wait for more information. The next target device for Kontact Mobile is the HTC Touch Pro 2.

Getting started

After installation you will have find five new icons on your phone that open the mail, calendar, addressbook, notes and tasks frontends to Kontact-Mobile.

You can of course start each one from command line. Please use

kmail-mobile.sh

(accordingly for the other apps), as this command sets the LD_LIBRARY_PATH correctly.

First thing you would want to do is to set-up a new email account. To do this you start mail, pull the flap Actions on the Homepage out, press Accounts, Add Account and then follow the instructions.

Note

you cannot do this from all frontends at the moment - but for email it works fine. If you should have a Kolab Server, all other applications will access the data from your server too.

You may change the following settings, by choosing the account and use Configure Account:

• Switch off interval sync. This might a bit too much if the initial sync has not gone through nicely (which is still possible with beta builds). You can turn it on later.
• Switch off handling of server side subscriptions (otherwise you might not be seeing some folder you are expecting to see).
• Enable disconnected mode for email if the number of emails you have is not that high. It mean a longer initial sync, but afterwards only changes get synced and the emails will be cached fully on the device.

Get encryption working

One of the core features of Kontact Mobile is your ability to communicate safely using S/MIME or OpenPGP. We do not provide the generation of keys on the mobile phone - you will need to set-up your keys on a computer, e.g. by using Kleopatra.

Assuming you have all your keys together on your computer, you can find them most likely in ~/.gnupg. Please copy this folder to your N900, by simply connecting it via USB with your computer and copying the folder (Note: you might need to change some settings to be able to see hidden files. In Dolphin this would be Alt + . ). Now disconnect your N900.

If you already have a .gnupg folder on your phone, consider making a backup or deleting it before you do next steps.

Close all Kontact mobile applications. Open X Terminal on the N900. If you copied the .gnupg to the root folder of your MemoryCard on your N900 (Default Name: 'MyDocs') the following commands in X Terminal will do the job for you:

mv MyDocs/.gnupg ~/.gnupg
chmod 700 ~/.gnupg

Now you should be able to read and write signed and encrypted messages.

Using it: Ideas and Concepts

Navigate through your folders by our flatten tree view. You can also choose to see multiple folders at once, when you click on Select on the homepage.

Actions can be accessed through what we call flaps. You have to pull them out, in order to not mix interaction up with clicking through your accounts and folders.

We hope the other ideas are straight forward and discoverable, so we do not want to give you more hints... Give us feedback if you think we are wrong with this assumption.

Contributing / Questions and Answers / Feedback / ...

There are many ways to contribute or feedback to this project:

You discovered a defect

Please report any problems to our Bugs page. You might find some hot workarounds in the issues attached to Bug #246519- Issues that need improvements in order to make n900 kdepim-mobile usable (aka "beta")

Note that we have created own categories for the mobile products, so please make use of that. For every problem you report, we need to know two things:

• What section from the apt repository did you use? (unstable, experimental or snapshots)
• What day did you last update your applications? (for version info)

To get the exact version run

dpkg -s kmail-mobile | grep Version

or

dpkg -l | grep kmail-mobile

in the terminal

If you think that a screenshot might illustrate your problem well, consider making one and add it (see below for finding out how to do screenshots on a N900).

Consider doing an update before reporting a problem. The project is under heavy development and chances are good that the defect has already been fixed.

The overall stability of the packages is good. We do not expect any data loss or severe problems, as we share much of the codebase with the desktop client. But still: This product is under development, so expect to experience any kind of bugs.

You want to share your experiences?

We are accompanying the development by steady usability work. You are very welcome to participate in this process. For this, but also for less structured feedback, consider joining our mailing list.

You want to contribute to the development

For the people with a more technical view we also communicate via a mailing list.

You want to stop all KDE-PIM related processes after testing?

We have included a small script that stops and shuts down all processes that might cost you resources even after you quit any KDE mobile application. Just open a console and run

kdepim-shutdown

to be sure there are no resource eaters running.

General N900 / Maemo 5 Hints

• If an application hangs you can press ctl(sym) + backspace (upper left and upper right button) simultaneously to get back to the application overview.

• To enter special symbols like < > or | you can push the arrow symbol in the upper left corner and then the ctl(sym) to get a symbol table.

• To make a screenshot, Press Ctrl + Shift + P. The screenshot(s) will be saved in /home/user/MyDocs/.images .