Akonadi – still alive and rocking

A lot of this discussion is a bit above my head - all I can say is I've used KDE since the mascot was Kandalf, but I recently put Mint on my laptop, and have just wasted most of the morning on this *&^#$% Akonadi on my desktop machine.

No sooner do we finally get the sound to work on KDE - after being told not to worry about the lack of audio, look how technically superior it is - than we get the same thing with Akonadi. This is a new install, and it won't work. It may be the greatest technical breakthrough since the moon landings, but it fails.

I have been googling the problem and I get a lot of results but no solution. So good bye rainbows and unicorns. I'm going for something less sophisticated that actually works.