I have to work in a Microsoft environment at work, but I use Linux (Slackware 12) at home, and I carry my important information back and forth via a thumbdrive.

I'm looking for an address book solution which could be used in both environments that is not online. I would prefer something that uses vCard for the native storage format so that I could easily grep/awk the file - shoot, I even have a portable setup of Perl running on the thumbdrive, but I'm not much of a developer, so I don't think I could code something from scratch.

I looked at abook (using Cygwin for the windows environment) but it did not seem flexible enough - there are a lot of fields I wanted to add but could not.

Does anyone have a suggestion on how to approach this?

David

I use Mozilla's address book. I first started using it as a part of the Netscape browser on Windows about 1998. I switched to Linux in 2000 and simply copied the Netscape address book to my Linux partition. Then I switched from Netscape to Mozilla and Mozilla works with the Netscape address book. The only maintenance I have had to do on the Mozilla address book is to copy it to a new partition whenever I install Linux to a new partition.

I can highly recommend the Mozilla address book as a solution that will work on both Windows and Linux and which does not require you to go through periodic data conversions.

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Steve Stites

P.S. The reason that I switched to Linux was that Microsoft installed some malware on my Windows operating system which sabotaged Netscape (see the Microsoft anti-trust suit for further details). I found that it was easier to convert from Windows to Linux than to copy all of my address book entries by hand to a new address book program.

Hello,

I have just started using Ubuntu and had the problem of moving my Windows address book to Firefox or Thunderbird. I finally found that by using plaxo.com and uploading my address book to this sync service I could then export it as an LDIF Netscape file that transfers perfectly.