I spend some time investigating if it is possible to create a more generic client using protocols offered by Egroupware (and other groupware suites). This approach however, proved to be a dead end. Two protocols can be used:

1. Carddav/Groupdav – Egroupware offers Infolog as a carddav webservice. However, only tasks are offered this way. Most calendar software (e.g. Thunderbird/Lightning) can subscribe to these resulting in no further improvement by using Infolog desktop client over such software. Note that I started the project specifically to gain desktop access to my notes.
2. Syncml – The only usable implementation I found was Funambols syncml. However, Egroupware does not play nice with Funambol. For insiders: the alert response is completely empty, even if you start a fresh sync. I filed a bug report (#3025) about this.

I realize that it is inconvenient to start a separate service and that configuration of the service is pretty hard, but I see no alternative.

I have been playing for hours to correct this. To no avail I have been trying many variations of settings of the ‘own_window_hints’. Until I noticed that running applications at the time of shutdown where restarted when Xfce was restarted. In the ‘Session and Startup’ of the Xfce settings manager, I had the option to save the session on logout deliberately disabled. Besides this, conky did not show up in the list of running applications in the ‘Session’ tab. Strange, but a ‘ps’ revealed multiple instances of conky. So no ghosting at all! Just 2 instances of conky running on top of each other.

Starting conky using the following bash snippet released me of this.

#!/bin/bash
sleep 10
conky=`ps -e | grep conky`
if [ "$conky" == '' ]; then
        conky &
fi

{path to Egroupware filemanager/cli.php} mount ‘filesystem://root_{username of Egroupware header manager}:{password of Egroupware header manager}@default{directory on real filesystem}?user={Egroupware username}’ {path in Egroupware filemanager}

E.g. on a Linux system with a Egroupware header manager named admin and a password set to adminpassword, a system user named raging and a Egroupware user named goblin, the following command will mount a (read-only) directory in the filesystem under /home/goblin/raging:

/srv/www/htdocs/egroupware/filemanager/cli.php mount ‘filesystem://root_admin:adminpassword@default/home/raging?user=goblin’ /home/raging/raging

See this thread for more info about it.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./imap.py", line 37, in <module>
    server.login(username,password)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.1/imaplib.py", line 517, in login
    typ, dat = self._simple_command('LOGIN', user, self._quote(password))
  File "/usr/lib/python3.1/imaplib.py", line 1067, in _quote
    arg = arg.replace('\\', '\\\\')

This guy explains how to solve it. As a quick fix I added a new line to /usr/lib/python3.1/imaplib.py on position 1067.

arg = arg.decode("utf-8")

Though this solution will only work until the next update, for now it will do.

1. Install Sun-JDK and don’t use the Google WindowBuilder.
2. Install both JDK’s and use the Sun-JDK with programs that need a system tray icon, and the OpenJDK with Eclipse and the Google WindowBuilder.
3. Install the OpenJDK en don’t bother with a system tray Icon.
4. Stop using Compiz.
5. Install Sun-JDK and use Windho$e in a virtual box.

The last one is not a real option of course, I only mentioned it to be complete .

Further enhancements include:
- Better readable README with explanation about using the application over ssh.
- Small improvements such as nicer icons to be used on the taskbar.
- Several bugfixes, e.g. using non-standard ports for Java RMI did not work in version 1.0.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "imap.py", line 37, in 
    server.login(username,password)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.1/imaplib.py", line 512, in login
    typ, dat = self._simple_command('LOGIN', user, self._quote(password))
  File "/usr/lib/python3.1/imaplib.py", line 1072, in _quote
    arg = arg.replace(b'\\', b'\\\\')
TypeError: Can't convert 'bytes' object to str implicitly

Found this issue about it. Changing the script with the diff suggested solved the problem. I added the following line right before logging in:

password = bytes(password, "ASCII")