Centralised calendar repository

[Don Levey]

I've found myself in an annoying situation, and I'm wondering of anyone
might have advice/suggestions.

My goal is to be able to use a Linux client such as Evolution for email,
calendar, and contacts.  Currently email via Evolution seems to work like a
charm.  The other two, though... not so much.  I want to make sure that my
wife and I can co-ordinate our calendars and contact lists, and I've having
a frustrating time getting this to work (depending upon the route, I can
achieve varying degrees of closeness before I hit a wall).

Ideally, we'd be able to use some sort of CalDAV package on the server to
accept all changes dynamically.  I've tried OSAF's Cosmo, but run into
dependency hell when trying to do the pre-build configuration (specifically
with Maven, but that's another story).  I've not found anything else that I
can build/install on my machine without a lot of extras (for example,
Novell's Hula, which includes an email infrastructure).

If I can't use CalDAV, I can probably live with WebDAV.  In such a
situation, I would regularly publish scheduling changes to the server, which
would then be accessed by the individual clients.  Based upon an article in
Linux Journal (http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8300) I was able to get
my Apache server to serve the .ics file via WebDAV in Evolution.  However,
it won't accept any publishing changes.  Oddly, it seems to want to access a
MySQL database, trying to find tables I never created (or thought I needed
to).  I hacked together a "user_info" table with ID/password information
(won't accept my password - encrypted or non - unless it's blank) and now
I'm being asked for the lock and properties databases. I have no idea what
to do next for this one.

I can publish stuff from my local calendar to am .ics file via ssh, but this
does not include any items on the central calendar.  If I did this, I'd
overwrite any existing items not specifically entered on the local calendar.
This is a client-side problem, and I'll be asking that of the Evolution
folks.

Meanwhile, does anyone have any lightweight (or at least non-bloat)
suggestions for accomplishing the calendar sharing?  From what I can tell,
I'll need to set up an LDAP server to share contact lists; that's the *next*
item down on the heartburn list.

Thanks in advance,
 -Don