Kontact Windows Mobile

From KDE Wiki Sandbox

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:

Warning
This page is under heavy development at the moment, basically it is a copy of the respective page of instructions for maemo/N900.


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


Installation and Update

Installation

We offer a cab installation archive for WM 6.5. Simply click that link on your browser and save the file on the external memory card (be sure you have good and affordable internet access when doing so).

Afterwards, execute the downloaded file (e.g. by navigating with the File Explorer to the download location).

The Installer will ask you for an installation locaiton, choose internal memory to be on the safe side.

Beware, the installation process takes a couple of minutes and the progress bar might not indicate progress for most of the time. Be patient. If nothing changed after half an hour, restart the phone.

Generally, in case of any issues during installation/deinstallation/usage process, restart the phone.

Update

Currently, there is no update process. Deinstall old, install new version.

Deinstallation

Before deinstallation, restart the phone.

Then uninstall via the Settings page. Note that deinstallation takes about 10 minutes. The only feedback you will get is the spinning whell of colored balls.

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

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.

Touch one of these and it will start. Note that the first start of any of these applications will take a long time, as it has to spawn some stuff that works deep in the background. Expect an initial waiting time no shorter than a minute.

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 an account on a Kolab Server, all applications willbe able to access the data fromit.


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, where you also might find some hot workarounds.

Use "Windows CE" as the target platform and enter komo3 as keyword to help us being fast in our response.

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 the version of Kontact Mobile you are running (you find it in the About Dialog, which is in the Actions/Application flap).

The categories are kmail-mobile (Mail), korganizer-mobile (Calendar and Tasks), kjots-mobile (Notes), kaddressbook-mobile (Contacts) and kdepim-mobile for issues that affect all applications.

To get the exact version, look at the About dialog in the respective application.

If you think that a screenshot might illustrate your problem well, consider making one and add it.

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?

Restart the phone.

General WM 6.5 Hints

  • None yet.