ISR Computing -

Command-line event management tools for Linux: Gcal and Gcalcli

Gcal

One day you might decide to switch to command-line calendar. Our suggestion will be GNU gcal.

wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gcal/gcal-3.6.tar.gz
tar xvzf gcal-3.6.tar.gz
cd gcal-3.6
./configure
make
make install
which gcal

After installation is completed let's run gcalc. Expected output is below.

[jsmith@reader ~]$ gcal

     August 2010
 Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
  1  2  3  4  5  6  7
  8  9 10 11 12 13 14
 15 16 17 18 19 20 21
 22 23 24 25 26 27 28
 29 30 31

[jsmith@reader ~]$

For testing purposes let's print calendar for the month of September.

[jsmith@reader ~]$ gcal --start-of-month --month September

    September 2010
 Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
           1  2  3  4
  5  6  7  8  9 10 11
 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
 26 27 28 29 30

[jsmith@reader ~]$

Gcalcli

In case that you need to keep track of your events and  meeting, I would suggest to use gcalcli.

gcalcli is an application that communicates with Google calendar.

To install it, you would need several Python modules listed below:

• python-gdata.noarch : A Python module for accessing online Google services
• python-dateutil.noarch : Powerful extensions to the standard datetime module

First, let's install them:

yum install python-gdata python-dateutil 

Now let's download gcalcli:

wget http://gcalcli.googlecode.com/files/gcalcli-1.4.tgz
tar xvzf gcalcli-1.4.tgz
mv gcalcli /usr/local/bin/

Next, we need to create .gcalclirc

nano ~/.gcalclirc

Paste your google username and password:

[gcalcli]
user: jsmithcisco.com
pw: jsmithpass

Configure permissions:

chmod 600 ~/.gcalclirc 

Now, let's list our events:

[jsmith@reader ~]$ gcalcli agenda

Fri Aug 13  12:00am  Forecast for 10023 (26° | 20°)
             2:00pm  Cisco Systems Forecast

Sat Aug 14  12:00am  Forecast for 10023 (27° | 20°)
             9:00am  Design Meeting - Day 1

Sun Aug 15  12:00am  Forecast for 10023 (27° | 23°)
             9:00am  Design Meeting - Day 2

Mon Aug 16  12:00am  Forecast for 10023 (27° | 24°)

[jsmith@reader ~]$ 

Common gcalcli erros include:

 Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/local/bin/gcalcli", line 59, in <module>
from gdata.calendar.service import *
ImportError: No module named calendar.service

Fixed by installing "python-gdata"

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/gcalcli", line 61, in <module>
    from dateutil.tz import *

Fixed by installing "python-dateutil"

Thu Aug 12Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/gcalcli", line 1114, in <module>
    DoooooItHippieMonster()
  File "/usr/local/bin/gcalcli", line 1042, in DoooooItHippieMonster
    gcal.AgendaQuery(startText=args[1])
  File "/usr/local/bin/gcalcli", line 779, in AgendaQuery
    self._PrintEvents(today, start, eventList)
  File "/usr/local/bin/gcalcli", line 626, in _PrintEvents
    '  %-7s  %s\n' % (tmpTimeStr, event.title.text))
  File "/usr/local/bin/gcalcli", line 207, in PrintMsg
    sys.stdout.write(msg)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/codecs.py", line 351, in write
    data, consumed = self.encode(object, self.errors)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 33: ordinal not in range(128) 

Fixed by commenting out the lines below:

# for unicode support
#sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter(locale.getpreferredencoding())(sys.stdout)
#sys.stdin = codecs.getreader(locale.getpreferredencoding())(sys.stdin)