Migrating Apple's AddressBook data to Linux

This article will explain how to export contacts from Mac OS X Address Book, and import them under Linux.

Exporting as vCard 3.0 format

On the Mac, you can only export in vCard format. The trick resides in the fact that the exported file is encoded in UTF-16, and apparently *NOT* on the encoding you specify in the Preferences (this is probably a bug).

So it is essential to reencode the exported file, in UTF-8.

Then, you can import this file with KAddressBook (the import will only work if the file is encoded in UTF-8; it will fail if you use the original file in UTF-16).

Once you have your data in KAddressBook, you can reexport it from there into various formats (for example if you want to use Mozilla's Address Book).