Sync Outlook with Google Calendar

One of the major hurdles for people to move away from Windows is the lack of a true Outlook alternative. The common scenario is you’re using Exchange at work, connecting via Outlook and using features such as email, calendar, contacts, tasks and more. While Evolution (Linux) used to work nicely with previous versions of Outlook, Microsoft made sure to burn that bridge with Outlook 2007.

While there still is no true replacement, there are tools available that make life quite comfortable on Linux/Unix without an Outlook client.


One solution relies on Google Calendar and a small utility that replicates all exchange calendar data to Google. This way, we can also access Google Calendar from anywhere. In my case, I have a running windows pc in the office. This pc is used to replicate Exchange data to Google using Google Calendar Sync.

This litte app replicates changes either way, from Exchange to GCal or GCal to Exchange, or as in my case both ways. In addition, Evolution can exchange data with Google Calendar directly.

Eclipse Ganymede and PDT 2.0 for PHP Development

With the release of Eclipse Ganymede, the IDE has become even better. I remember using Zend Studio for Eclipse 6.0.1 for about two weeks, after giving up and moving over to Netbeans 6.5. Too many issues with the debugging part, constant exceptions and a sizable slow down when working on web pages just got me too frustrated.

Now Ganymede is out for a while, but I just haven’t given it a change until now. And I’m positively surprised. While still fairly slow and lagging wile editing html/css content, gone are the countless exceptions, the cumbersome, seemingly endless installation procedure and also xDebug integrates quite nicely with the IDE. There are still a few caveats during the install, especially on a 64 bit environment.

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Dual Boot Ubuntu 9.04 and Vista

…with Windows Vista / Windows 7 installed first.

So you got a computer running Vista and like to dual boot between Vista and Ubuntu. The boot loader that ships with Vista can be a real pain. There are some nice utilities we can use to make that process a lot smoother for us. Here we go.

First you’ll need space for the Ubuntu installation. If you don’t already have a partition for it, right-click My Computer -> Manage -> Disk Management. Right-click on the main Vista partition and select Shrink Volume. The Shrink tool will assess how much space you can free up. (If you don’t have enough free space, Vista will not allow you to shrink it and the available space to shrink will be zero) You should have at least 12GB of free space for the new OS, if you don’t have that much it’s probably time for a new hard drive.

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Ubuntu 9.04 beta released

Over 4 years in the making of Canonical’s Operating System, Ubuntu 9.04 (jaunty jackalope) has released the first and final beta, after successful public testing of alpha 1 thru 6. I have to say, Ubuntu has come a long way. This version is the first one (for me at least), that installs without a hitch, and everything is working at first try.

The biggest pain was always to get the network working. Since one needs the Internet to research issues and find solutions, once connected everything seemed workable.

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