Fedora/KDE contact lists - looking for advice:

[Timothy Murphy]

I've been trying for some time (years in fact)
to find a good way of storing email and phone contacts
on a LAN-wide basis.

I'm currently running OpenLDAP and dovecot/IMAP on my CentOS-5.5 server,
and access this with KMail/KAddressBook/Kontact on my laptops.
This works, but I don't find it entirely satisfactory,
perhaps because I don't understand how to use it properly.

Some of the unsatisfactory features of this setup are:
When I run Kontact on my Fedora-14 laptop,
under Address Books is listed Personal Contacts,
but highlighting, and left- or right-clicking on this has no effect.

There is a line at the top which says "Search"
but putting anything in there has no effect.

My LDAP server is listed when I click on
File=>Import=>Import from LDAP server=>Configure LDAP Servers
but clicking on OK appears to have no effect.

The Kontact Help/Handbook is fairly useless, at least for my purpose,
since it says that KAddressBook is the "KDE contact manager",
but also says that there is no documentation for this.

However, when I go to KMail=>New on the laptop and enter part of a name,
it seems to find the name at once in the LDAP server.

KMail=>Tools=>KAddressBook seems to bring up more or less the same window
as Kontact, with the same lack of response to any input.

Actually, even if Kontact worked reasonably well with OpenLDAP
I would not be entirely satisfied, since I find the LDAP setup
rather constrained, with a very rigid format for InetOrgPerson,
which seems the standard entry type to use for contacts.

Also, I've never found a way of getting mobile phone contact lists
to combine (eg with Bluetooth) in any way with anything on the computer.

But this must be an issue that many people have faced.
How do you all keep your contacts available on different machines?


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland