blog.crox.net

Lightning is a Thunderbird plug-in that adds calendar functions. More on the mozilla.org page. I tried to install the .xpi from there, but it failed with the following error message:

"Lightning" could not be installed because it is not compatible with your Thunderbird build type (Linux_x86_64-gcc3). Please contact the author of this item about the problem.

So I downloaded the source from this page, and followed the instructions from here. This page and the link to that one were also helpful.

In case you don't want to open all those links, I've put the resulting .xpi file here for you to download: lightning-0.3.1-x86_64.xpi. Or if you prefer to build it yourself, here is how I did it:

[untar/bz, cd mozilla]
make distclean
export CFLAGS="-O2 -pipe -fPIC"
export CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"
export CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
export MAKEOPTS="-j3"
ac_cv_visibility_pragma=no ./configure --enable-application=mail --enable-extensions=default,lightning
make

(of course you may want to change some stuff to better suit your system, I've got a Core 2 Duo laptop running Gentoo Linux)

Then just select Tools > Extensions in Thunderbird and install the lightning.xpi you've just built (located in dist/xpi-stage/lightning.xpi).


UPDATE - 2007-06-28 - Lightning 0.5

After reading Matthew's comment I downloaded the newly released Lightning 0.5 from here, and built lightning-0.5-x86_64.xpi following the exact same procedure that I used for 0.3.1. Then I installed it from Tools > Extensions, restarted Thunderbird and immediately noticed the different appearance. (I did not uninstall 0.3.1 first, which apparently is ok.)

There is no 64 bit version of Google Earth for linux, so you'll need to make sure you have the latest version of the following packages first:

app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-baselibs
app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-compat
app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-gtklibs
app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-qtlibs
app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-soundlibs
app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-xlibs

This allowed me to start GE in the first place. But then it was horribly slow, although glxinfo reported "direct rendering: Yes" etc.

When started from the console, GE would output the following:

do_wait: drmWaitVBlank returned -1, IRQs don't seem to be working correctly.
Try running with LIBGL_THROTTLE_REFRESH and LIBL_SYNC_REFRESH unset.

Doing a search led me to try setting LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 before running Google Earth. Indeed the warning disappeared, and GE was really faster. However, as soon as I would zoom too close, the whole screen was getting more and more sky-blue, until no image was being displayed anymore...

Finally, I found this article, and especially the comments from Eduardo Habkost and "Researcher".

I followed Researcher's instructions, and Google Earth is now working perfectly. For your convenience, I've put drm_nowaitVblank.c here to download (you cannot copy-paste from the original page because the parser there treats the includes as html code). Also to compile the code on amd64 you'll want to use gcc32 and not gcc...