Good News How-Tos and Bad News Dilemmas about Contacts/Calendar PIM-Making

[jakfish]

In the long journey to make a LLL a genuine PIM, there is both good news and bad news.  First the bad news:

In gpe calendar, the calendar seems stuck on US Pacific Time no matter what steps taken.  I need US Eastern Standar Time (+5 GMT).  After changing settings in Time/Date/TimeZone, in the etc/timezone file, I find "US/Eastern" but when I successfully import either an ics file made in Google or Outlook 2007 (that's some of the good news: ics files appear to imort well), the events are a universal 5 hours ahead of US Eastern Time.

Edit: Even when changing a google ics to GMT 0+, which would be 10 hours behind PST, arguably compensating for the 5 hour lag, gpe calendar still assigns PST time to all timed events.

Is this fixable?  It appears to haunt a lot of gpe calendar users outside of the LLL.

But there is good news about importing your contacts into X Contacts.  Vcards will work ONCE you have reduced street addresses to a single line.  Out of 330 contacts, 50 failed to import with no explanation why.  I looked over the vcard printouts and finally determined that this won't work for the street address:

125 Hampton Lane
Suite 501

That will stop the import.  It must be:

125 Hampton Lane, Suite 501

Make the street address into a single line, using commas.

Further good news.  To import vcards, the contacts must be in individual vcard files.  Tedious to do out of Outlook, until you go here:

http://www.peculiarities.com/code/vba.html

Mr. Grimes has made a wonderful batch macro that will save all your contacts as individual vcards in /tmp/contact/contacts.  Post here if you're uncertain about the vba procedure, but it does work in Outlook 2007.

But back to gpe calendar.  Has anybody successfully changed the timezone in this program?  I would be very grateful for any pointers/links.

All best,
Jake

[jakfish]

GPE Calendar Timezone Problem SOLVED:

It turns out that poor gpe calendar has been unduly blamed.  The culprit is UTC time.  If you type "date" in console, you'll see "UTC" regardless of how you've set your timezone.  This site helps to change this:

http://www.wikihow.com/Change-the-Timezone-in-Linux

In Step 5, you basically create a new file in /etc called "localtime" (or at least you create a symlink to it)  I had looked at this page before, but couldn't find the file /etc/localtime.  I didn't realize that you essentially have to make it yourself, then change it.  I was able to skip Step 7 and still get EST time, which now sets all appointments correctly in gpe calendar.

Hope this helps others,
Jake