Integrate Rainlendar Calendar with Thunderbird

by Mandar Vaze on February 21, 2009
in Linux, Productivity, tips, windows

Image by David Ascher via Flickr

So after I started using Rainlendar as my Desktop calendar, now I had two calendars to maintain. One was Rainlendar Calendar, and other was Thunderbird calendar via lightning plugin. It would asoon get cumbersome to update both the calendars. Wouldn’t it be nice if they shared the same calendar ? If they did, irrespective of which calendar I use to create/update the events and taks, the other would always be in sync.

Unfortunately, the default file format used by Thunderbird ins’t .ics (or iCalendar format). By default, it stored the calendar in storage.db. But there is a way around it.

While Thunderbird does not use .ics file format for its own calendars by default, it supports use of iCalendar on the network (like Google Calendar) But Rainlendar calendar is not on the network. So you trick Thunderbird (or lightning, depending on the way you look at it)

Go ahead, and create new calendar on network.
choose .ics format, but use file:// protocol to point to existing calendar created by Rainlendar.
Then you can delete the default one called Home. (If you have only once calendar, you are unable to delete it.)

Thanks to this thread on Ubuntu Forums for providing me this idea.