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.)

UPDATE - 2008-09-28 - Lightning 0.9

Download from http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/releases/0.9/contrib/linux-x86_64/

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...

An update to my initial article on installing Gentoo on my nx7400 laptop:

I've switched to kernel 2.6.21-gentoo (latest gentoo-sources available currently with ~amd64), and to the latest versions of ipw3945, alsa and xorg, and suspend to ram works fine now. (the screen would not switch on again with vanilla kernel 2.6.19)

Hibernation (suspend to disk) seems to work as well, apart from the fact that the screen resolution is not restored correctly, but for now I'm happy with suspend-to-ram.

Fondu is "A set of programs to interconvert between mac font formats and pfb, ttf, otf and bdf files on unix."

I think that says it all :o) In particular, it allowed me to convert a .dfont-packaged font from a Mac to a set of .ttf files that I can use on my linux desktop.

For years I've been annoyed by the habit thunderbird has to set "Content-Disposition: inline" when you attach a text file to an outgoing e-mail.

Experimenting with our mail to fax gateway, I finally took the time to fix it today. As with some other "advanced" settings in Fireforx/Thunderbird, there is an option you can set to achieve the (imho) correct behavior, but no GUI dialog for it.

So in order to have outgoing text files attached with "Content-Disposition: attachment", you need to set mail.content_disposition_type to 1 (default is 0). You can do this by going to "Edit" -> "Preferences" -> "Advanced" -> "Config Editor". (Using the windows version it's probably "Tools" -> "Options" -> etc.)