[Evolution] Importing Evolution 1.4 Contacts in Evolution 2.0

[Alan MacLeod <alan eng com>]

Hi,

I was previously using Evolution 1.4.6 on  Mandrake 9.2 with Gnome V2.4.
Due to many gnomeprint problems (Evolution stopped printing completely -
probably due to installing TurboPrint - another story), I upgraded to
Mandrake 10.0.  This made no difference.  I then backed off the key
files and directories (for example ~/evolution for all users) and did a
clean install.  Evolution was fundamentally unstable and after opening
an E Mail closing it would cause a segmentation fault, i.e. clean
install on old ~/evolution directory.

After all this, removed Evolution 1.4.6 from the system and installed
2.0.0 from Mandrake's 10.1 community release (pre release).  The
Evolution folders were moved back in to the users' directories.  On
first starting Evolution it automatically tried to upgrade from the
previous version, all E Mail was converted (as far as the messages
indicated) but it basically stopped when it came to contacts (this is
true of all users).  Stopped in the sense that the dialog box was on the
screen, and could be moved easily, and the upgrade process was shown as
sleeping in Gnome Monitor.  Numerous attempts around this area yielded
the same results.

I recreated the users home directories and started Evolution without a
~/evolution directory and created the E Mail accounts manually.
Importing calendar, EMail etc. worked (albeit the browse dialog would
not accept that a file had been selected and would keep reappearing),
with the exception of the contacts folders.  Again this is true for all
accounts.

Running file on the contacts file indicates that they are Berkeley BD 7
Bit files, which implies that they are not corrupted (and it was
unlikely that they were all corrupted).

My question is simple, how do I get the contacts information out of the
file and back into Evolution?  It would be an enormous headache to go
back to 1.4.6 as you can imagine, is there an alternative?  I've trawled
the web and cannot seem to find any utilities that could do this for me.

Thanks in advance

Alan.

alan eng com

PS Love Evolution, would move from Outlook at work as well if we had a
more imaginative IT department!