Thunderbird E-Mail Installation
 

My knowledge of Linux is considerably greater than that of my GGG Grandmother, but not nearly as great as that of my 4 year old GG Grandson so please bear with me.

I am using Debian v 6.04 and am trying to install Thunderbird E-Mail from a Tar file.

I have run the 'tar xvjf' extract and now have all the files in a separate directory.

When I run ./configure however I get the message - 'bash: ./configure: No such file or directory', and I certainly would appreciate if someone could tell me how to get around this minor inconvenience which appears to be 100% effective in stopping the installation.

I contacted the Mozilla Linux Support Department at the number listed on their Linux website from which I downloaded the file but they told me that they do not offer support for Thunderbird Linux, at least that is my understanding of what the person said because English obviously was not their first language.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Many Thanks.

why would you like to install from tarball? you can easily install thunderbird in synaptic packege manager..

Thank you for the reply but even my GG Grandson and I had looked there before I posted my message and neither of us could find it. :D

There is nothing to configure.

download, extract, create a thunderbird.desktop to launch, copy the thunderbird.desktop file to /usr/share/applications so it shows up on the menu.


I just leave the thunderbird dir in Downloads, I copy the icedove.desktop and edit it for thunderbird. The important lines are the Exec= and Icon= make sure they point to the correct place.

my thunderbird.desktop
It is called Iceedove in Debian and in Stable last I checked it is several versions behind Mozilla's version of Thunderbird.

In Debian it is called Icedove for licencing reasons.

Normally using Software Manager to install software here on Mint. But Synaptic Package Manager finds Thunderbird without a problem :)
Typed in Thunderbird in the Quick Filter window and there it was. :)

Edit:
@post above me.
I see. Never used Debian so wasn't aware of that. Bit odd though that Debian does that. I mean Thunderbird is freeware. Why do they need to change the name cause of licensing reasons?

For the same reasons Firefox is called Iceweasel.
Mozilla Corporation software rebranded by the Debian project - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icedove

Thunderbird=Icedove
Firefox=Iceweasel

Thank you to all for the replies. Had I known IceDove and Thunderbird were essentially the same program I would have installed it without bothering with Thunderbird, but, being a REAL Linux expert, ...

However, I have another question that maybe someone can answer.

I have 2 E-Mail accounts and with Thunderbird I could set them up as:-

Account 1
Inbox
Sent Mail
etc, etc

Account 2
Inbox
Sent Mail
etc, etc
Trash

With IceDove however, the setup looks like this.

Inbox
Account 1
Account 2
Sent Mail
Account 1
Account 2
Trash
Account 1
Account 2

Is there any way I can edit this to make it appear the same as in Thunderbird.

Many Thanks.

Well Icedove == Thunderbird (apart from 'branding' and security patches) so it should be exactly the same (as the same Tbird version).

Look under View - Folders for various layout options.

POP or IMAP accounts may be different as well (I use IMAP and each account is listed separate)

Many Thanks for the reply, and you are absolutely correct.

For anyone else who may encounter the same problem, my confusion lay in the default Folder view. It is set to 'Smart', and for the display to be the same as Thunderbird it should be set to 'All'.

As I said in the beginning, "My knowledge of Linux is considerably greater than that of my GGG Grandmother, but not nearly as great as that of my 4 year old GG Grandson". :D

Your help is much appreciated.

Cheers