Ical

What this is

This is Sanjay Ghemawat's Ical program designed for X-Windows systems. It stores calendars in its own proprietary ~/.calendar files.

What this isn't

It is NOT Apple’s iCal or the IETF iCalendar standard RFC2445, RFC5545 or successors.

Features

Ical is a calendar application. Some of the important features are:

Items can be created edited and deleted easily.
Items can be made to repeat in various ways.
Ical will post reminders for upcoming appointments.
Ical can print and list item occurrences.
Ical calendars can be shared by different users.

Screenshot

Background

Historical and alternate sites

This site hosts a copy of Sanjay Ghemawat's Ical program created when he was at DEC, Palo Alto back in 1993.

It was originally hosted at DEC, Palo Alto and then also at MIT, but these sites are long defunct.

For a long time, the FreeBSD port pulled this software from an FTP mirror at ftp.sunet.se but, in around October 2019, that FTP site also stopped working.

Gabbar Singh has a useful Ical blog.

In around 2004-5, RedHat released a v2.3 update with patches to make it run on their system.

In around 2006, Richard W. M. Jones ran the Ical Maintenance Project at Annexia, releasing v2.3.1 and v2.3.2, but this is now also defunct. A copy can be found in the Intenet Wayback Machine. He also did a v2.3.3 version, but we have not been able to obtain a copy of this tar file.

Another hosting site is John Heidemann's site at ISI. This has the v2.3.1 update.

Since 2008, Sergei Golubchik has been maintaining a Launchpad project to add a small number of new features to Ical.

This site at Opal was created on 2019/12/20 in order to ensure that there are sufficient source sites remaining of this software and to collect all the various versions in a single site.

FreeBSD port

A FreeBSD port is available in the ports collection.

Install from a package:

pkg install deskutils/ical

Compile and install from source:

cd /usr/ports/deskutils/ical; make; make install clean

Files

These versions are the ones we have found mentioned on the above websites in 2019/12. The ones with blue links have been copied and are available here. Versions with the FreeBSD icon are available in the FreeBSD ports collection. Versions with the Opal icon are also available here at Opal, but were never committed to the FreeBSD ports collection. You can click on these icons to download a shar file of that port version.

	Description	Date	File
Post-Sanjay releases:
The Sergei Golubchik releases:
	Source code	2019/04/14	ical-3.0.4.tar.gz
	Source code	2018/02/10	ical-3.0.3.tar.gz
	Source code	2011/08/26	ical-3.0.2.tar.gz
	Source code	2011/07/14	ical-3.0.1.tar.gz
	Source code	2008/11/13	ical-3.0.tar.gz

The Richard W. M. Jones releases:
	Source code	2007/??/??	ical-2.3.3.tar.gz
	Source code	2006/04/19	ical-2.3.2.tar.gz

From John Heidemann's site, but probably intially also a Richard W. M. Jones release:
	Escape patch	2008/08/08	ical-2.3.1-escape.patch
	Free patch	2006/04/29	ical-2.3.1-free.patch
	Tcl/Tk 8.5 patch	2008/06/03	ical-2.3.1-tcltk-8.5-configure.patch
	upvar patch	2008/08/08	ical-2.3.1-upvar.patch
	Source code	2004/03/11	ical-2.3.1.tar.gz

The last Sanjay Ghemawat release:
From ftp.sunet.se:
	Source code	1999/08/06	ical-2.2.tar.gz

Copyright

This page

This page is maintained by J.R. Oldroyd, <fbsd@opal.com>.
This page was last updated on 2021/10/01 15:30 UTC.