Lightning users: Seamonkey and Thunderbird updates
 

Hi everyone,

good news regarding the updates in Slackware 14.1 of 28th March, 2014:

Seamonkey 2.25 works just fine with Lightning 3.0b1.

I am posting this, because some previous updates of Seamonkey (and, to my knowledge, Thunderbird) broke compatibility with some extensions, including Lightning (for more info see this thread).

Also, this time a compatible German language package has been made available in time, too. Unfortunately it cannot be updated with the Add-ons manager, but you can download and install it from seamonkey.at. Just in case, I am not the only one interested in this... ;)

I sincerely hope that future updates of Seamonkey go as smooth as this one, other than sometimes in the past.

Can anyone comment on Thunderbird? I am not using it, so I don't know. BTW, I am on Slackware64-14.1.

gargamel

Good to know, thanks for the update. I've been waiting for Lightning to catch up with Thunderbird. I'll give it a shot and report back.

EDIT: I have Lightning 2.6.4 working with Thunderbird 24.3.0, Slackware 14.1, 64-bit.

Another update working: Seamonkey 2.26 seems to work well with Lightning 3.1b1.
Other than stated on that page, I had no luck with Lightning 2.6.5.

I don't use Thunderbird, myself. Can anyone confirm, that Lightning works with the recent update?

gargamel

Works for me with Lightning 2.6.4.

No working Lightning version for Seamonkey 2.31
 

After upgrading to Seamonkey 2.31, Lightning stopped working again. Other than stated on the download page for Lightning, neither Lightning 3.6b1 nor 3.6b2 install, but don't work. Other versions don't even install.

Has anyone had more luck with Seamonkey 2.31 and Lightning/Mozilla Calendar?

gargamel

I just installed 3.3b1 and it displays properly. I can never remember how to import my own event calendar (birthdays of friends and family).

3.3b1 is huge step back, and the download page says, it's not available for SM 2.31; or did you mean 3.6b1? In that case: I have tried it, too, but without success... :(
Usually it's not necessary to re-import anything...

gargamel

It works.

Update: ... but not very well. I'm going to keep looking and hopefully a new working version for the latest SeaMonkey will appear in the near future.

Lightning 3.6b1 and 3.6b2 are supposed to work with Seamonkey 2.31, but they do not. See this bug report: Lightning 3.6b1 does not work with Seamonkey 2.31

A work-around in that bug report is to use an interim build from here: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.o...idates/build3/

Note that unlike the released Lightning, the interim builds have separate 32- and 64- bit versions.

I have looked at the posted 3.6b1 and 3.6b2, and it seems to me that they completely left out the binary component libcalbasecomps.so so there is no way this can work with Thunderbird or Seamonkey. But I note that this is meant for Thunderbird-34 which is still beta, so maybe no Thunderbird users noticed yet.

@ljb643: Thanks, this is very useful information.
This is all no good. I need a reliable calendar application, but I also don't want to skip updates with security updates and such. :(

gargamel

If you don't mind working from command line. 'remind' is an excellent calendar application. It's available on SBO.
John

More on Lightning-3.6 and Seamonkey-2.31:

I read that you can get lightning-3.6b1 and 3.6b2 working by going into about:config and changing the setting 'calendar.icaljs' to TRUE. (You can also do this in the prefs.js file.) This applies to Seamonkey-2.31 as well as Thunderbird-34beta.

This apparently switches in an alternate implementation (that does not use the binary library component, which is missing in these releases). But be aware that there are reported to be some issues with this. "It's buggy with timezones" was the comment.

I tried it, and it does seem to work with Seamonkey-2.31 and Lighting-3.6b2.

Side note: As bad as this is in Slackware, if you are using a Gnome desktop environment, opening the calendar apparently crashes the entire desktop.

I forgot to add that I read that lightning-3.6b3 is said to fix this and will be up soon.

Yes, I know, it is very powerful, and teams up nicely with Wyrd. A simpler, but also quite good calendar is Calcurse. But they both don't allow me to create tasks and appointments directly out of emails, and things tend to get tedious, when you have multiple calendars (business, personal, family, events etc.) and want to flexibly overlay them in arbitrary combinations. This is my use case, though, and that's why calendars are one area where I prefer GUI applications over CLI applications. No don't that all I need could be done with Remind, it just would be an intellectual challege every time I want to change something. ;)

gargamel

Thanks, this is good news.
BTW, I don't think, it's a problem "in Slackware". Missing binaries will affect *many* distributions... But your information on crashing Gnome is interesting, all the more, as Seamonkey and TBird are GTK based applications. ;)


gargamel

Lightning-3.6b3 has been released and it does work with Seamonkey-2.31.

Note: If you used the work-around I posted above to get 3.6b1 or 3.6b2 working, you should reset the configuration setting calendar.icaljs to the default, then restart Seamonkey. It will work without this, but I think you want to be using the library implementation vs the alternate JS one.

Hmmm, I'm following -current closely, and never experienced problems with thunderbird, lightning and german language pack. Except, the miserable manual downloading of the language pack. Maybe, if I remember correctly, the language pack was missing for about one week this year.

Wonder where the problems arise from. Must be somehow setup-specific (?).

Good luck
Franz

Thanks again, 3.6b3 seems to work fine with Seamonkey-2.31, here!

gargamel

Thanks. I don't think that the issues are related to specific setups. They occur, when a new Seamonkey/Thunderbird release comes out, and they disappear when Lightning catches up with a compatible version. I guess, as you follow -current "loosely", you were just lucky so far, and updated Seamonkey/Thunderbird only when a compatible Lightning version was already available. Therefore you never noticed any problems, as you just skipped the periods of time, when no compatible version of Lightning was available. But I am just guessing, of course.

gargamel

Today Seamonkey 2.33.1 arrived for Slackware. As usual, an update of Lightning is required, if you use this extension. For the most part Lightning 3.8b2 seems to be compatible with Seamonkey 2.33.1. However, if your locale is non-US English, you may see error messages like this:

The reason seems to be that some variable names have changed, but not consistently in the program and in the translations. Instead of dayInterval... there is daysInterval... in the relevant file calendar-de.properties (replace de, which denotes a German local, with the code for your language, here).
Fortunately, the fix is simple: Just remove the s, putting the variable back to its singular form. To do so, extract the file

locale/<your language code>/calendar/calendar.properties

from the JAR file

~/.mozilla/seamonkey/<yourseamonkeyprofileID>.default/extensions/{UUID of Lightning extension}/chrome/calendar-<language code>.jar

and replace all occurrences of the plural form daysInterval... with the singular form dayInterval. Then add the modified file back to its original place (in the JAR file).

Note, that future versions are probably going to use the plural form consistently.

I borrowed the information above from here (German, but there are English resources available, too, on the web).

Though not a big deal, as it seems. However, I am more and more losing faith in the Seamonkey and Lightning developers. Is it really so hard to align translations with stable releases? I don't get it, why I can download Lightning for Seamonkey 2.35, which hasn't even been announced, while there is no consistently localised version for the most current stable release. Will they ever make serious attempts to get this together? :(

gargamel