Gaunt Face | Matthew Gaunt

Installing Sunbird 0.8 on Ubuntu 8.04

Sunbird Home Page Sunbird is a stand-alone calendar application that can be installed on Windows, Mac OS X and linux.

In this tutorial I’ll explain how to install the 0.8 release of Sunbird on Ubuntu, although it may be possible to adapt for other linux distributions. The reasion you may want to install the 0.8 release, over the version in the Ubuntu repositories, is that some plug-ins require the latest version of Sunbird, in particular “Provider for Google Calendar”, which enables syncing with Google Calendar. I would like to give a special thank you to Benjamin Garnier for supplying me with the Sunbird logo used in this tutorial. This tutorial is for people who are comfortable using a terminal.

1. Download the Latest Release of Sunbird
2. Extract the Files
3. Install Sunbird Dependencies
4. Set Permissions of the Files
5. Launching Sunbird from the Terminal
6. Fixing the Chrome Registration Error
7. Adding Sunbird to Applications Menu

Requirements:

• None

1. To start off we need to get the latest .tar.gz file from the official Sunbird site here.
2. Now we need extract the files into the /opt directory on your computer, so cut and paste the .tar.gz file into your home folder if it isn’t there already and open a terminal to do the following.
   • sudo tar zxvf sunbird-0.8.en-US.linux-i686.tar.gz -C /opt/
3. Sunbird requires some dependencies, so we’ll need to install these before we continue.
   • sudo apt-get install libstdc++5
4. The next thing to do is set the files permissions so we can launch Sunbird from /opt directory.
   • sudo chown -R root:root /opt/sunbird/
   • sudo chmod -R 755 /opt/sunbird/
5. You should now be able to launch Sunbird with this command.
   • /opt/sunbird/sunbird
6. If you get an error message like this one 

   

   then type the following command and it should fix it.

   • sudo touch /opt/sunbird/extensions/talkback@mozilla.org/chrome.manifest
7. I’m assuming many of you, like me, would prefer Sunbird to be installed in the ‘Applications’ menu, rather than have launch it through a terminal. This is easy to achieve.
   1. Right click on the ‘Applications’ menu (on the top left of the screen) and select ‘Edit Menus’
   2. Select the category you would like to place the Sunbird launcher and click ‘New Item’ (I’m going to place the Sunbird launcher in my office category)
   3. Now in the new window that pops-up, set each part to the followingType: Application
      Name: Sunbird
      Command: /opt/sunbird/sunbird
      Comment: Mozilla Sunbird Cross-Platform Calendar Application

      

      Now to change the icon right click and select ‘Save Image As’ on the image below.

      

      (Icon kindly provided by Benjamin Garnier).Save/move this picture to a place you are happy to leave it because if you move/delete it at a later date your menu item won’t have an icon.
      When you’ve saved/moved ‘sunbird.png’ somewhere, click on the “spring” icon and select ‘Browse’ in the window that opens, find your icon and click ‘Open’ and then ‘OK’.

      

   4. Finally close the menu editor and Sunbird should now be under your chosen category.