After my decision of switching University IMP-based email system to Thunderbird, and my current behavior of using Google Calendar for appointment/deadline notification (both academic and non-academic), I’d like to see my schedule from Thunderbird as well.

This is possible via Mozilla Calendar project, which provides both standalone calendar client (Sunbird) and extension for Thunderbird (Lightning). No problem for network syncing since the present world is using iCal format and Google Calendar provides it, definitely.

A Linux.com’s review of Sunbird/Lightning 0.5 tell me that Lightning doesn’t support read/write function of networked calendar. That means I can’t put new event in Google Calendar via Thunderbird. Fortunately, all problem can be solved by Provider for Google Calendar extension.

The steps are easy:

1. Install Thunderbird 2.0
2. Install Lightning 0.5
3. Install Provider for Google Calendar 0.2.1
4. Go to your Google Calendar account, select the calendar you want to subscribe and copy the XML feed link. (Full howto)
5. Open Thunderbird menu: File > New > Calendar > on the Network > Google Calendar and paste the link you copy. Name it and choose the color. That’s all

P.S. I also tried Lightning 0.7 RC1 and CVS build of Provider for Google Calendar. No success, step back to stable version.