(This page is about Sanjay Ghemawat’s ical, not Apple’s iCal or the IETF standard.)
Ical is still (IMHO) the best calendar program for Unix.
RPMs and Patches
For quite a while I maintained ical (which means, I built RPMs for my version of Fedora).
I did an RPM for the Fedora Core 2 version since my Redhat 7.3 RPM finally (!) stopped working. Thanks to Richard Jones for the ical maintenance project for maintaining the code; I just did the .spec.
As of Dec. 2004 there are now slightly different versions for Fedora Core 2 and 3.
As of April 2006, a patch is needed to fix a bug in the freeing code. (It’s not clear why this bug didn’t appear sooner, or what changed to trigger it now.)
As of June 2008, another patch is needed to support tcl/tk-8.5, and there’s a new version for Fedora 9.
As of August 2008, I found another tcl 8.5 upvar problem, and added escape as a dialog-box-exiter.
- Fedora Core 2 versions: ical-2.3.1-1.fc2.i386.rpm, ical-2.3.1-1.fc2.src.rpm, ical-2.3.1-1.spec
- Fedora Core 3 versions: ical-2.3.1-1.fc3.i386.rpm, ical-2.3.1-1.fc3.src.rpm, ical-2.3.1-2.spec
- Fedora Core 5 versions: ical-2.3.1-2.fc5.i386.rpm, ical-2.3.1-2.fc5.src.rpm
- Fedora 8 versions: ical-2.3.1-3.fc8.i386.rpm, ical-2.3.1-3.spec
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Fedora 9 versions: ical-2.3.1-4.fc9.i386.rpm, ical-2.3.1-4.src.rpm, ical-2.3.1-4.spec
Updated August 2008: ical-2.3.1-5.fc9.i386.rpm, ical-2.3.1-5.src.rpm, ical-2.3.1-5.spec
Converting Ghemawat-ical to iCalendar/ics with ical2ics_la
Finally in June 2009 I decided to bite the bullet and move my 15 years of calendars to a modern format. (If you want to know: I tried evolution, but gave up because it ate multiple appointments. I currently run Mozilla Tunderbird with Lightning, just using the calendar.)
I started with Florian Schaefer’s ical2ics.pl, but he was correct that it didn’t handle recurring events. Much hacking later, I have ical2ics_la.pl something that works better. You’re welcome to try it, but caveat emptor, I only claim works for me.
Get your ical2ics_la.pl source code or read the ical2ics manual page. (Now updated 4-Sep-09 to work with perl-5.8.)
Patch contributed by Andrew Pam 2012-06-02 to handle multi-line contents fields, plus todo and done fields.