How to install Thunderbird 3.0 under Linux

YOU MIGHT HAVE HEARD that Mozilla released Thunderbird 3.0 last week.

This update to Mozilla's popular multi-platform alternative email client was long awaited, reportedly having been under development for two years by more than 1,000 coders in the Mozilla Foundation's developer community worldwide.

Released under the open source Mozilla Public License, Thunderbird 3.0 is a sophisticated email client application that's easy to use but also very capable. It's definitely much better than Microsoft's Outlook - or 'Lookout' as we call it - and all the minimalist legacy Linux email clients, and it offers some stiff competition to Gnome's Evolution and KDE's Kmail email clients.

Mozilla has risen to close in on 30 per cent market share with its Firefox web browser. Its Thunderbird email client is, similarly, solid software, and we think it should do increasingly well as an alternative to Microsoft's email client.

Since Thunderbird 3.0 has just been released, Linux distributions are going to take weeks - or in some cases, months - to package and release official versions.

So, if you don't want to wait for your chosen flavour of Linux to catch up, here I'll show you how you can install Mozilla's Thunderbird 3.0 right now, alongside what you already have, with some backup protection.

But, don't blame me if you mess this up and manage to lose your lifetime email collection.

Similarly, I devised this process under Mandriva Linux, so while I include some hints that might be helpful under other Linux distributions, if you are running another flavour of Linux there may be some discrepancies that you'll have to figure out on your own.

If you're using Linux and are familiar with commands such as ls, find, cp, tar, rm and ln, you should be able to breeze through this successfully.

Preparing to Install

If you have your existing Thunderbird 2.X email client application open, close it.

Download Thunderbird 3.0 here. It should ask you where you want to save the file, unless you've already chosen where you want to save all downloads, in which case you will know where that is. Let's call that your /download directory.

Open a Linux terminal. Get into root mode, otherwise known as superuser mode, using the command su. If you're running Ubuntu, just prefix all of the following commands with sudo as you're already used to doing when you mess around with your Linux system under Ubuntu.

Back up your existing Thunderbird 2.X configuration, where on my system 2.X equals 2.0.0.23. I happen to have a far too large /tmp partition on my hard disk, so I simply backed up my /home/egan/.thunderbird directory to /tmp/.thunderbird-2.0.0.23 using the commands mkdir /tmp/.thunderbird-2.0.0.23 and cp -a /home/egan/.thunderbird /tmp/.thunderbird-2.0.0.23/, but you may put your backup anywhere you like.

You'll probably delete that backup rather soon anyway, once you've decided that Thunderbird 3.0 works fine. You'll also want to backup your /etc/thunderbird.cfg file to something like /etc/thunderbird.cfg-2.X too, while you're at it.

Run find / -name *thunderbird*. If you are not already running Thunderbird, this shouldn't find anything except the Thunderbird 3.0 file you just downloaded. If you are already using a Thunderbird 2.X release, it will find where Thunderbird lives on your system. On my Mandriva system, it found there were two files in /usr/bin and the rest of Thunderbird was in /usr/lib, for the most part.

On my system, one of the files in /usr/bin was /usr/bin/thunderbird, a script file, so I didn't want to touch that. The other  /usr/bin file was /usr/bin/mozilla-thunderbird and that was a soft link that pointed to the thunderbird file in the same directory. That was the key information here.

Then check your desktop's main menu item properties for Thunderbird, if you're already using a previous release. On my system using the Gnome desktop GUI, that says it loads mozilla-thunderbird. Now you will begin to see how this works.

At this point I need to say that if you're using a KDE 4.X desktop, you are on your own, because - like Linus Torvalds - I don't care for that. If you're using KDE, you'll just have to figure this out. This process should work about the same under KDE, however.

Installing

Okay, now installing Thunderbird 3.0 goes rather quickly.

1) Copy the downloaded Thunderbird 3.0 release file thunderbird-3.0.tar.bz2 to /usr/local. You can use the Linux command cp -a /download/thunderbird-3.0.tar.bz2 /usr/local/, where /download is wherever you downloaded the file.

2) Switch to the /usr/local directory with the command cd /usr/local.

3) Then, untar the file with the command tar -xvjf thunderbird-3.0.tar.bz2. This will create the /usr/local/thunderbird directory and populate it with all of the Thunderbird 3.0 software.

After you've untarred the distribution file you can delete it by using the command rm thunderbird-3.0.tar.bz2 and answering "y" to the prompt.

4) At this point, you're almost done. Use the command rm /usr/bin/mozilla-thunderbird and type "y" to the prompt to delete that link.

5) Then use the command ln -s ../../usr/local/thunderbird/thunderbird /usr/bin/mozilla-thunderbird to link to Thunderbird 3.0 at the location where you've just installed it.

6) Congratulations, you've just installed Thunderbird 3.0. Use your desktop menu Thunderbird entry or Thunderbird panel icon to launch it.

Post Install

After you've installed Thunderbird 3.0 and launched it for the first time, you'll immediately be presented with several pages as it welcomes you and migrates your email environment.

I assume you were already using Thunderbird 2.X here. If not, the Thunderbird 3.0 Migration Assistant automates migrating your email files from other email clients, and other sources offer advice about how to migrate your existing email environment to Thunderbird.

What's New
This is the first page you'll see the first time you fire up Thunderbird 3.0.

Migration Assistant
Thunderbird 3.0 will index all of your local folders, displaying its progress in the lower left border of this page. Depending upon how many saved emails you have, this might take a few minutes.

Inbox
Here's an example of what a Thunderbird 3.0 Inbox with an email display panel looks like.

Once you decide to keep Thunderbird 3.0 as your new email client, you can then delete your backed-up .thunderbird-2.X directory, wherever you put that, as well as the /etc/thunderbird.cfg-2.X file.

I used the commands rm -rf /tmp/.thunderbird-2.0.0.23 and rm /etc/thunderbird.cfg-2.0.0.23 to delete those Thunderbird 2.X backups.

If you were already using Thunderbird 2.X, your Linux distro should update that, replacing the entire Thunderbird 2.X package and superceding your temporary installation of Thunderbird 3.0. If so, when your Linux distro releases the update, it should replace the link at /usr/bin/mozilla-thunderbird to point to wherever it installs Thunderbird 3.0.

If you weren't using Thunderbird 2.X, you'll have to find Thunderbird 3.0 in your Linux distro's software repository after a decent interval. Once you find it, you can update your system with your Linux distro's official package.

After your Linux distro automatically updates to Thunderbird 3.0 or you install its official package, you can check to verify that it superceded your temporary installation by using ls -l /usr/bin/mozilla-thunderbird to confirm that the link no longer points to .../.../usr/local/thunderbird/thunderbird, and if so, you can then delete the temporary version of Thunderbird 3.0 with rm -rf /usr/local/thunderbird. Be careful with rm -rf.

So there you have it. µ

L'Inq
Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0