Some of you may know that Thunderbird 1.5 was released yesterday, and I decided to install it (in SUSE Linux 9.3). Yesterday, no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't get the Thunderbird 1.5 installer to update my Thunderbird 1.0.6 files...
Mozilla wasn't much help... Their readme file directed me to http://getthunderbird.com/releases and the Get Thunderbird site listed:
Other Platforms
Extract the compressed archive and runthunderbird
as the installation instructions for "Other Platforms" (which seems to be *nix systems
I even restarted my computer (thwarting my uptime at right around 5 day - such a small number!) to no avail. It seemed almost as if the installer wasn't actually installing anything... Or perhaps, it wasn't installing it to the same path that SUSE installed Thunderbird 1.0.6 all that time ago... I decided to give up; playing around with this was only going to lead to a broken SUSE 9.3 system, and a weekend spent fixing it (causing undo stress all weekend long). I ended up just going to bed...
The Next Day
Alright, so I kind of woke up in the middle of the night, with only four hours of sleep (half because of all the trouble I have sleeping and half because I had a bit of a stomach ache -- ¾ of a pot of coffee, 2 cups of earl grey, and 4 beers with minimal food throughout the day can do that to a guy) so I got up. I noticed that Suzi-LNX's LCD was still powered on (to a black screen) and not in power save -- which it should have powered off after 10 minutes. So, I decided to go check it out. I couldn't find any problem... Annoyed, I decided to proceed onto my next issue of annoyance... Thunderbird.
I started the task with a new concept, but I already fully believed that there was no way in hell that I was going to be getting TB to work, there was obviously something I just didn't understand about the installer script that was preventing me from accomplishing my goals... It could even be something along the lines of SUSE using a non-standard installation directory, but theoretically, to fix that issue, I would just have to point my TB links to the default location, or reinstall TB to the SUSE location. Either way, I wasn't too confident, but I did have my "new concept" that I was going to try out... The concept was:
- Use
KSysGuardto find the executable path of Thunderbird 1.0.6 - Close Thunderbird 1.0.6
- Under
user, execute the Thunderbird 1.5 installer - When Thunderbird 1.5 attempts to run, check
KSysGuard, and note the executable path of Thunderbird 1.5 - See if there is someway to use that path instead of the one for Thunderbird 1.0.6
Well, KSysGuard listed:
thunderbird /bin/sh
thunderbird /opt/MozillaThunderbird/lib/thunderbird-binI was pretty sure that
/opt/MozillaThunderbird/lib/thunderbird-bin was what I really wanted. I then closed Thunderbird 1.0.6 and started 1.5 (by going to the uncompressed installation files and executing
./thunderbird) and I checked KSysGuard again, this time seeing:
thunderbird /bin/sh
thunderbird ./thunderbird-binwaa! I could have nearly cried right there! The one path that I really needed wasn't listed! But the
./ gave me an idea... It may be pulling the thunderbird-bin from the installation folder! WAA! Could it be so simple?! YES! I checked
/opt/MozillaThunderbird/lib and compared it to the "uncompressed installer folder" - and to my surprise, they were nearly identical! I shutdown my current instance of the Thunderbird 1.5 installer and decided to take the risky path... I was going in as root, renaming /opt/MozillaThunderbird/lib to lib.old and moving the installer file in there (renaming it "lib" instead of "thunderbird")... And then, I'll just execute one of my links to Thunderbird to see if it actually worked... DUN DUN DUN! It worked! *yatta*
Thunderbird 1.5 now installed!
What Was the Deal?
Well, it seems that there was one little thing I missed,
Downloading Thunderbird 1.5
...
Linux: GTK2 + XFT (no installer)
I interpreted the "no installer" part as "not provided in a package" -- meaning that I'd have to compile the software... It turns out that it meant something entirely different. Although this was my fault, I think the Mozilla site (GetThunderbird is part of the Mozilla site) should have listed that fact.
So, what I thought was an installer wasn't an installer at all, it was just a folder full of binaries... I'm glad I figured it out ^_^
