Kontact Touch/Harmattan

Introduction

There are some packages of Kontact Touch for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan. This is the operating system of the Nokia N9 (and N950) smartphones.

Installation

To install the packages you have to switch your phone into developer mode, since the packages are not yet available in the Application Store (reachable via Settings -> Security -> Developer Mode). This will also install an ssh server on your device which makes the rest of the installation much more comfortable.

Configure SSH

Note

This step is not really necessary since you can also do everything directly on the terminal of your device.

To connect to your ssh server you first have to set a password for the "user" account. To do that open the Terminal application and use devel-su to log in as root (default root password is rootme) and set the password for the user by calling passwd user. Now you are able to connect to your device as user and configure the OpenSSH server as usual.

Repositories

Kontact Touch packages need the nokia development repositories and the files.kolab.org repo (which contains the packages) so that all dependencies can be installed. To enable them (as root):

echo "deb http://harmattan-dev.nokia.com/ harmattan/sdk free non-free
deb https://files.kolab.org/local/maemo/dists/harmattan ./" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/community.list

Installation with apt-get

To install the most recent version of Kontact Touch you can then call:

curl https://ssl.intevation.de/Intevation-Distribution-Key.asc | apt-key add -
apt-get update
apt-get install kdepim-mobile

Note

When using a non-English version of apt, the continue question still needs a y as an answer to move on.

Note

If you get an error like:

https://downloads.maemo.nokia.com ./ libgmp3c2 2:4.3.2+dfsg-1+maemo5+0m6
The requested URL returned error: 404

You can get the the package here and install it manually with dpkg -i. The link to this package appears to be broken in the Nokia repository.

Use "MyDocs" as Cache

Warning

When syncing an significant amount of data and you are not absolutely sure it will fit in your home directory, you must move the cache off the home directory partition to MyDocs! Consider three times the size of your complete imap account contents. If you fill up the root partition an N9 defect might make your device unbootable and in need of reflashing.

You can symlink the akonadi directory (/home/user/.local/share/akonadi) to somewhere where you have enough space available. MyDocs usually has more space available, see the following steps:

make sure that akonadi is disabled (akonadictl stop / akonadictl status)

As root do (Please check after each step if it worked correctly and not copy/paste everything):

cp -r /home/user/.local/share/akonadi /home/user/MyDocs/akonadi

Now as user

rm -rf /home/user/.local/share/akonadi
ln -s /home/user/MyDocs/akonadi /home/user/.local/share/akonadi
echo -e "[Connection]\nSocketDirectory=/home/user" >> /home/user/.config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc

The configuration change of the socket directory is necessary because MyDocs is by default a vfat that does not support akonadi's way of symlinking it's socket in the .local directory.

When starting with an empty akonadi database, it is recommened to raise the threshold value which determines when an object will be saved as flat file. Therefore less files get saved to /home/user/.local/share/akonadi/file_db_data/. This avoids hitting the Mydocs-partition limitation on the number of 32764 files per directory too early. You can do this to add the following line to the "General" section of /home/user/.config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc with an editor. You can chose any value, the default is 4096. Make sure akonadi is stopped.

SizeThreshold=8192

Additional Notes

Make sure to check out the general Kontact Touch page, especially note the recommendation to use KWallet in the account setup section.

With some of the platform integration missing, you may get dialogs which are hard to use just with the touch screen because they are too small to hit with your fingers. Especially some of the settings are hard to reach. Consider using the VNC mode, which you can enable in the SDK setting of the N9. This way you can type and use a mouse from a desktop system.

Known problems (Version 20120522)

The Strigi daemon fails to start putting up an error message now and then and causing address completion and full text search not to work.

The icons might be just some strange red squares until you restart.

Command line use of GnuPG

You need to execute

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/libgpg-error/lib:/opt/libgcrypt/lib

Before you can use gnupg (or use gnupg as crypto backend in kmail / kleopatra)