Thunderbird will not run (SOLVED - upgraded KDE)

[akvisto]

Recently installed latest Thunderbird 3.0 via Synaptic.
Clicked on Thunderbird in the PC menu tree.
In Taskbar see the revolving hour-glass and Thunderbird label (for several seconds)
Then - absolutely nothing happens.

If it helps - also installed Claws Mail and Seamonkey (separately) as alternatives and get the self same results as above.
.thunderbird appears in folder search.
Firefox still works fine.
Web search brings me here to PCLinuxOS site.
Please help  

[caerhays]

Hi akvisto and welcome to the PCLOS Forum.

I had a similar problem in December when I upgraded from Thunderbird 2.0 to 3.0

Log in as root into your file manager (I use Krusader) and look in your "/home/user" directory for the ".thunderbird" directory. When you find it, rename it to something else (eg. .thunderbird2).

Install Thunderbird 3 from the PCLOS repository of your choice and it should work now. However you will find it sets up a clean new .thunderbird directory with none of your previous saved messages.

What you need to do now is log in as root again into your file manager and look for the mail files you want to copy over from your original .thunderbird2 directory into your new .thunderbird directory. I think most of the files and folders are held in the "Mail" directory within the "xxxxx.default" directory. 

If you had an addressbook full of contacts you will need to copy this over. it is named "abook.mab" and is amongst the files in the "xxxxx.default" directory.

I don't know why the update doesn't just work as it seems to for most everyone else. Could be due to some particular hardware configuration. Who knows !.

I hope this works for you.  If it does, please edit the subject line of your post and add the word SOLVED in capitals.

Cheers

[akvisto]

Hi akvisto and welcome to the PCLOS Forum.

I had a similar problem in December when I upgraded from Thunderbird 2.0 to 3.0

Log in as root into your file manager (I use Krusader) and look in your "/home/user" directory for the ".thunderbird" directory. When you find it, rename it to something else (eg. .thunderbird2).

Install Thunderbird 3 from the PCLOS repository of your choice and it should work now. However you will find it sets up a clean new .thunderbird directory with none of your previous saved messages......

Hi caerhays, thanks and thanks for prompt response.
I followed the steps you proposed without success,
- also tried to force earlier version of Thunderbird (which worked fine before) but the menu item in Synaptic is ghosted,
- also installed Evolution  with the same result as before - nothing happens.

So Thunderbird, Claws, Seamonkey and now Evolution have all been tried and all refuse to work.
It seems that anything with a mail component to it will not run on my system.
I wonder if I have inadvertently removed a dependency, or something else, that kicks these off.
Best wishes
 

[Ramchu]

Are you using kde 4.x or 3.x

 If you are still using kde3.x then your system may very well be broken. We were advised to upgrade to kde 4 about 3 months ago
as kde 3 was no longer supported - and we were warned continuing to update kde 3 that some packages way not work .

[caerhays]

Hi Ramchu,

I'm not sure if you're correct in saying everyone should have updated to KDE 4. I have a fully updated system and my KDE is version 3.5.10. There have been no updates for a while now as the team are working on the full PCLOS2010 which I understand will be a new install rather than an upgrade and will include KDE4 as the desktop.
Anyone else have a view on this?.

[akvisto]

Thanks Ramchu and caerhays for help.

- tried upgrading to KDE4, Synaptic only carries KDE 3.5.10-10 so went ahead and upgraded this
  with good results
  - Claws Mail runs well !
  - Thunderbird runs but - cannot set up initial acount due to Java error code box  [  this._init is not a function   ]
     (copied and pasted) which keeps popping up.
     This is technically a separate problem I guess, should I post it as such ?
     
Evolution and Seamonkey still  do not run but these might be more suited to the Gnome environment ?
and I don't really need them.

Learning as I go - upgraded all installed Java packages but TB still sticks on the above error code.

I'll continue with Claws which suits my needs well and come back to Thunderbird from time to time,
nightly builds seem at first to be complex.

[Texstar]

KDE 4 is in a special section with specific update instructions as to no force an upgrade to keep the 3.5 users happy.

[drrdf]

I had similar problems when updating to Thunderbird 3 and eventually the only way in which I could get it to run was to delete the lot and set it all up manually. What a disaster it is.

I also had problems with Evolution 2.28.2, which although it ran OK with receiving all my accounts will not send any of my accounts. When I searched for data relative to this I discovered that evidently there is a bug in this release. Evolution 2.28.2 will not send on other PC installations which I have running Linux Mint also.