I notice that there has been a lot of talk on here about the Mozilla Firebird web browser. But, I would like to mention another Mozilla product that I am using. The thunderbird mail client is pretty cool. The number one reason that I use it, is because I dual boot between windows and linux and want to use a cross-platform mail-client whose local mailbox is the same. With a little bit of effort, I was able to get thunderbird to do this.

Beyond that, it has some pretty good features for still being in "development" mode. Check it out at the mozilla website if you are interested.

If you want help setting up a common mailbox, let me know and I will post how I did it.

Cheers.

Is it possible for you post a simple "how-to" for newbies like me already? I am interested but not for a few more months. Once I am ready we can pick this thread up with any other questions I (or someone else) may have.

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Thunderbird Mail Client Mini-Howto

Revision Date: Jan. 22, 2004

Introduction
This is a small howto about getting the Thunderbird Mail Client to work on a cross-platform system (ie Windows/Linux) and to share the same location for mail storage. This document should also provide good pointers for people wishing to install Thunderbird on Windows or Linux only (esp. Linux).

About Thunderbird
Thunderbird is an email and newsgroup client with junk mail controls and other advanced features that runs under Windows, Linux & MacOS. It is made by the people over at mozilla.

Preresequites & Shortcomings

• You need to have a seperate partition set up for data sharing between your Linux and Windows. If you are going to dual boot, this is a must anyway. Windows wants to use NTFS file system and Linux wants to use an EXT2/EXT3 file system. Windows will not recognize EXT2 file systems and Linux, by default will only read a NTFS file system. The Linux kernel does have support for writing to a NTFS filesystem, but it is marked as dangerous. I would not try it. For this howto, it is assumed that there is a seperate partition, formated as FAT32. This partition is mounted as d:\ in windows and as /mnt/data is Linux.
• Most people will find this howto extremely basic or maybe even insulting to their intellegence. I have been somewhat verbose in the Linux installation particularly because I figure too much information might be better than too little.
• I have not figured out how to share the address book yet. If I find this out, I will modify this document and let you know.
• The configuration files are also not shared. That means that you will have to set up your junk filter controls and receiving options seperately for each install.

Installation under Windows
Thunderbird is still in active development and should continue to improve. At the current date, however, there is no installation program. Installation under windows is quite simple however.

1. Download the windows version of Thunderbird at the main site.
2. Unzip the contents to a location where you want the program "installed". c:\Program Files\Thunderbird is as good a location as any.
3. Create a link to the desktop or start menu as desired. If you want to the program to start at boot up, place it in your Startup menu.
4. Just click on the program to run it. All dlls are located in its installation directory and it will look here for those.
5. The first time you run it, it will ask you the common questions needed to setup a mail account. Answer these to setup your mail account. If you don't need cross-platform you're done.
6. If you want to make a common storage location, you will want to do it immediately (within 10 minutes) so that your mail is not checked in the meantime. This is pretty simple to do though.
7. Under the tools menu, go to account settings.
8. Under your new account that you just created (not Local Folders). click on server settings.
9. There will be an entry for Local Directory. This defaults to your "home" directory in windows. Change this to your common directory, something like d:\name\mail\account_name.
10. If the mail was checked before you get this done, exit the mail program and copy the contents of the original location to the newly defined location.

Installation under Linux
Installation under Linux is a bit more involved, but if you have installed anything in Linux, this should not be too bad. If more detailed instructions are needed, let me know.

1. Download the linux version of Thunderbird at the main site.
2. First of all, you will need to be root to proceed. Either log in directly as root or do a su -. Then pull up a terminal session.
3. Save this file into a place where it will be used. I use /usr/local/bin for things like this ussually.
4. Extract the file using tar
   
   Code:

   tar yxvf thunderbird-0.4-i686-pc-linux-gtk2-gnu.tar.bz2

   Your filename may differ depending upon what the current release is. If you don't know about command completion, this is a great place to use it. Basically, if you type in the first few letters of a file and press tab, the shell will complete the filename for you as long as it is the only thing that begins with the letters you have typed.
5. Change to the thunderbird directory and start the program by typing:
   
   Code:

   ./thunderbird

6. If you are lucky, you will get the thunderbird mail client. If you are unlucky (as I was) you have a dependancy issue. Please refer to Linux Dependancies below.
7. Once again you will be asked to configure your mail account on startup. Fill in the appropriate values again.
8. Once thunderbird is running, you will need to configure it to read/store your local mail from your configured directory. Once again under tools go to account settings.
9. Change the Local Directory entry under the Server Settings tab to the proper directory, such as /mnt/data/name/mail/account_name
10. To add thunderbird to a KDE menu use the menu editor button under the settings menu on the KDE menu. I set it under the Internet submenu. Just use the New Item button and make an entry for Thunderbird. Put "/usr/local/bin/thunderbird/thunderbird" as the Command and "/usr/local/bin/thunderbird" as the work path. Set the icon to the icon located under the icons directory in the thunderbird working directory.

Linux Dependancies
If you get an "error while loading shared libraries" printed to your console instead of the thunderbird mail program, you have a situation refered to as dependancy hell. It is one of the frustrating things about Linux. Instead of discussing why this is and what advantages it may have, well just deal with it.

1. My installation needed a package called glibc. It can be downloaded here. You will need to download two files from this location. At the time of writing the most current version of glibc is 2.3.2. You need to download the glibc file along with the glibc-linuxthreads file. You can get the most current version, but make sure that the versions of both are the same.
2. In order to build glibc version 2.3.2, you must have gcc version 3.2 or higher. To check your version of gcc, type
   
   Code:

   gcc -v

   If you don't have version 3.2 or higher, go to the section labelled Update gcc and then come back to this file.
3. Once again, make sure that you are root and copy the glibc-2.3.2.tar.gz file to a location where it can be built. A good place for this is /usr/local/src.
4. Extract the contents using tar
   
   Code:

   tar zxvf glibc-2.3.2.tar.gz

5. Next copy the glibc-linuxthreads archive file into the newly created glibc-2.3.2 directory and extract it here.
   
   Code:

   cp [file location]/glibc-linuxthreads-2.3.2.tar.gz glibc-2.3.2
   cd glibc-2.3.2
   tar zxvf glibc-linuxthreads-2.3.2.tar.gz

6. There is an INSTALL file that is under the glibc directory that gives more detailed instructions for installation. Most linux source code projects have a file like this. You can follow these instructions in the INSTALL file or for generic and simple instructions continue on here.
7. It is recommended that the build of glibc is done in a different directory than the source directory. So we need to create a build directory.
   
   Code:

   mkdir /usr/local/src/glibc-build
   cd /usr/local/src/glibc-build

8. Now comes the familiar configure/make/make install process. First the configure needs be called with
   
   Code:

   ../glibc-2.3.2/configure --enable-add-ons --prefix=/usr

9. If this completes without error, you can simply type make followed by make install. Please note that make will take quite a while, even with a speedy processor and probably hours with a lower end processor.
10. I got some minor errors back from configure that I was able to take care of. If you get some other errors, please let me know. If configure doesn't return any errors, the application will almost always compile.
11. You should be able to run thunderbird without a problem now...

Update gcc
Well, not only do you get a new mail client, but an updated version of the great gcc compiler! Seriously, this may seem like a lot of work to install a mail client, but you are updating your out of date utilities at the same time. Besides, the only part that takes forever is the actual make command. You can have your computer compile over night. There is no interaction necessary unless an error occurs and then you have to start over anyway. Also, Linux does very well at multi-tasking, so you can work on your computer during compilation.

1. Get the recommended version of gcc. For glibc-2.3.2, it is currently recomended to use gcc-3.2. Use the following link to find the closest mirror.
2. Copy this file to your source code directory, potentially /usr/local/src
3. Extract this archive file using the tar yxvf (for bz) or tar zxvf (for gz)
4. Once again, it is recommended to build the package in a directory seperate from the source directory. So you should make a directory call gcc-build under your source path, ie /usr/local/src
5. Enter your build directory and call configure from the source directory like:
   
   Code:

   ../gcc-3.2/configure

6. From here you can type make followed by make install. Once again, this is going to take some time.
7. Go back to the glibc installation.

Hopefully this is of use to someone. Either respond to this forum or send me a PM if you have any problems or comments.

So what have you done to achieve this? Do you actually have one profile
or do you just share the mailbox? I thought sharing the mailbox is quite
simple, just a symlink from my Linux profile's mail directory to the Windows
profile one... but since I really want to have a single profile so changes
of preferences in Windows are also applied to Linux I haven't got very far
with that approach.

cheers

Hi Lee.

Yes, sharing the mailbox is *somewhat* simple, but I gave detailed instructions for installation on both systems.

I however, at the time, don't have my shared settings set properly. I know this is possible. I saw something about it on thunderbirds site. I have not investigated this, as the settings are set one time for each system and then it is done. I can see if I can find a link for this and post it.

Lee, I haven't tried this, but this link here seems to have some pretty good info on sharing your profile.

There are also some problems that I can see from reading some of these posts. If you do get something working, I would really appreciate it if you could post something back here.

Good Luck!

I also dual boot, i had been just having my windows email client leave the mail on the server. makes me read some email twice but i hardly ever go into windows

This is very good info tho!

I envy you :-)

I have a laptop that I use at work and at home. I am constantly in windows at work (Autocad) and found that I enjoyed working in Linux at home better, but it was annoying having to boot back into windows to look at/respond to email messages.

I looked quite a while before I actually found a mail client that could go between both and use the same folder for messages. Now, I am *always* in Linux at home.

I was able to share mailboxes, filters, settings etc. between a windows XP partition and a linux partition. I have a second drive for shared storage that is formatted w/ FAT32 mounted as /mnt/shared. I installed Thunderbird on Windows and configured it, I then copied the entire contents of C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Thunderbird to the shared drive and pointed my windows install of thunderbird to this location. Then I booted into Linux (Fedora Core 3) and ran Thunderbird -P and created a new account. You should be prompted with an option to choose a folder to use for your profile. Browse out to your shared drive to the thunderbird folder and voila. Actually not quite Voila... the first time I tried this I was not able to open Thunderbird, it said I had to create a new profile as mine was in use - not sure why. I deleted and recreated the profile, again pointing to the shared folder and it worked fine the second time. I may have done an su in between - I can't remember and I'm too lazy to recreate it. It took me a little tinkering but I got it working fairly easily.

I love programs that don't require an installation .... unzip and run the executible. Just like the good ole days!!

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