Still not finished with my Gnome-Desktop, what I can say that there are some great features that I really missed on Windows for years, however I want to use my Thunderbird and Windows parallel and decided to use dual-boot with the same thunderbird-profile-directory. Wheezy still has a 3.x icedove (=thunderbird) client, and my Windows installation already has a 7.0.1, so I needed a new client, and could not find any distribution out there. Means I was forced to build it by myself. There were two guides that helped my with that topic the one was from Mozilla, the other one for an Ubuntu-build. Here is my step-by-step guide:
get sourcecode
get sourcecode from mozilla, in this case for building 7.0.1
wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/7.0.1/source/thunderbird-7.0.1.source.tar.bz2
unpack file
tar -vxfj thunderbird-7.0.1.source.tar.bz2
change to direcotry
cd comm-releases
get build-backages
apt-get install build-essential libasound2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libnotify-dev libxt-dev libiw-dev mesa-common-dev autoconf2.13 yasm
and dependencies from the icedove (debian version of thunderbird) package
apt-get build-dep icedove
create .mozconfig file
This file controls what is built and is specific for the mozilla project. In the first line I let the build put the new files in a new directory “thunderbird-7.0.1”
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/thunderbird-7.0.1 ac_add_options --enable-application=mail mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=mail ac_add_options --enable-optimize ac_add_options --enable-calendar ac_add_options --disable-crashreporter
Here I disabled the crashreporter, because you run into a problem with deprecated headers on wheezy, a known bug of the mozilla build.
workaround for bug with 3.0 kernel
A workaround for another open bug with the mozilla build, on 3.0 kernels, just needed if you really are on a 3.0 kernel.
cd mozilla/security/coreconf cp Linux2.6.mk Linux3.0.mk
start the build
make -f client.mk
after the build finished change to the build-directory
cd thunderbird-7.0.1
create the deb-package
make -j4
there is already a metapackage “thunderbird” on debian so we need to give it another name checkinstall also asks you for some stuff for naming and describing the package
checkinstall -D --install=no --pkgname=´thunderbird-fairtec´ --pkgversion=´7.0.1´
install the package
dpkg -i thunderbird-fairtec_7.0.1-1_amd64.deb
