Nightmare in PIM-land

I'm trying to make sense of the setup in kdepim-4.8.2-1.fc16.i686. I can say at once that this facility is in a terrible mess, The documentation is either non-existent (KAddressBook), out-of-date (<http://userbase.kde.org/KAddressBook>), or utterly confused and confusing (The Kontact Handbook). The best place to start seems to be f=>System Settings=>Personal Information. Clicking on this lists a number of Akonadi "resources". I have 4 entries here which seem to be relevant to my present purpose: Address Book Personal Contacts LDAP Address Book akonadi_googledata_resource_0 Let me call these my four Contact Lists. On highlighting any of the first three, and clicking on Modify, I get some information about the entry. Address Book points to ~/.kde/share/apps/kabc/std.vcf Personal Contacts points to ~/.local/share/contacts/ LDAP Address Book points to the OpenLDAP database on my server akonadi_googledata_resource_0 points to my Google email address. Now I've left System Settings, and gone to f=>Office=>Personal Information Manager. (I can get to the same place in many ways.) My 4 Contact Lists appear, together with a Search folder, which I shall ignore for the moment. I've highlighted Address Book, which is empty at the moment, and added a New Contact, "Anne Murphy", and a New Group, "Knapton Court Residents Association". Checking, I see that the contact is indeed added to ~/.kde/share/apps/kabc/std.vcf The group appears in the file ~/.kde/share/apps/kabc/distlists However, I can see no way to add the contact to the group. According to <http://userbase.kde.org/KAddressBook> ------------------------------- Groups will replace Distribution Lists. Auto completion makes it quite easy to add entries to the group. In KDE SC <= 4.4.2 you can't use the group quite like a distribution list, typing the name and expecting it to be expanded into a list of names. You can, though, copy and paste the list of names from the right-hand panel. ------------------------------- I don't really understand what this means, but I don't see any way of associating or adding a contact to a group. -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College Dublin