You are currently viewing a snapshot of www.mozilla.org taken on April 21, 2008. Most of this content is highly out of date (some pages haven't been updated since the project began in 1998) and exists for historical purposes only. If there are any pages on this archive site that you think should be added back to www.mozilla.org, please file a bug.


These Release Notes cover what's new, download and installation instructions and known issues for Lightning 0.7 Please read these notes and the bug filing instructions before reporting any bugs to Bugzilla.

What's New in Lightning 0.7

Lightning 0.7 is the latest release of our calendar extension for Mozilla Thunderbird®. We recommend that all users upgrade to this latest version.

  • It is now much easier to switch between the mail and calendar parts of Thunderbird thanks to a user interface redesign.
  • A redesigned event/task dialog has been enabled to gather feedback from the community. It offers a much cleaner user interface and additional functionality including:
    • Events/Tasks can be created in different timezones
    • Attendees can be added from a local or corporate LDAP directory.
    • Free-Busy information is available for users of the Sun Java Calendar Server.
    • Integrated display of recurrence patterns, reminders and attendees
    • Custom recurrences and reminders
    • Clear separation between tasks and events
  • The new event summary dialog lists all the details of tasks and events for calendar which are read-only.
  • The Today Pane gives a quick overview over your current tasks and upcoming events. The Today Pane can be enabled/disabled by a toolbar button.
  • Colliding events (events in the same time slot) are shrunk so that they fit into the display of a day. This no longer affects other events on the same day.
  • Localized releases of Lightning in Chinese (simplified), Georgian, Lithuanian, Portuguese (European), Spanish (Argentina) and Turkish
  • A full list of changes that have gone into this release can be found on The Rumbling Edge website.

Release Date: October 25, 2007

Downloading and Installing

Downloading Lightning 0.7

Mozilla.org provides Lightning for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X in a variety of languages. To get Lightning 0.7, download it here.

For builds for other systems and languages not provided, see the Contributed Builds section at the end of this document.

Installing Lightning

Lightning runs as an extension to either Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.0.x or the preceding release Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5.0.x.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR WINDOWS USERS: Install the updated timezones for Windows. Information on obtaining the updated timezones can be found in Microsoft Knowledge Base article 931836.
Not updating your Windows timezones will result in unreliable and erroneous display and entry of time data! Be sure to do this!

IMPORTANT: If you have been using the old Calendar Extension, be sure to backup the ICS file that it put in your profile directory, and uninstall the Calendar Extension before installing Lightning. After you have installed Lightning, you can then import your old events and tasks from the backed up ICS file.

  1. Right-click (Control-click on Mac) the download link and choose "Save Link As..." to download and save the .XPI file to your your hard disk.
  2. In Mozilla Thunderbird, under the "Tools" menu, open the "Add-ons Manager" (Thunderbird 2.0) or the "Extensions Manager" (Thunderbird 1.5).
  3. Click the "Install" button, locate and select the .XPI file you downloaded in step 1, and click "OK".
  4. Restart Mozilla Thunderbird.

Known Issues

This list covers some of the known issues with Lightning 0.7. Other important known problems in this release are listed on this page. Please read both lists before reporting any new bugs.

All Systems

  • After updating to Lightning 0.7 you should remove all Calendar-specific buttons from your mail toolbar, as they may no longer work as expected due to the interface redesign.
  • After updating to Lightning 0.7 your calendars will all have been disabled. To enable them again, switch to Calendar mode and enable your calendars by checking them in the calendar list.
  • Lightning 0.7 will attempt to guess your timezone on startup. As this is only a best guess, you must manually set the timezone in Preferences/Options before entering data. Not doing so may cause events to appear at the wrong time.
  • Lightning 0.7 will only display the email invite messages from other parties, if "View -> Display Attachments inline" is set in Thunderbird.
  • Lightning is not usable on Japanese versions of Windows with Thunderbird 1.5. (bug 330121)
  • When installed in Thunderbird 1.5, Lightning can not read iMIP invitations sent from users of Apple iCal.app. However, this works correctly in Thunderbird 2.0. (bug 351997)
  • E-Mail invitations generated by Lightning are not recognized by Outlook 2003 due to the mail MIME structure. (bug 377761)
  • Thunderbird will crash, if the Funambol extension 0.3.2 or earlier is installed. (bug 384850 or bug 398617)
  • Thunderbird will crash, if the Birdiesync extension 1.5.4.3 or earlier is installed. You must update to Birdiesync 1.5.5.0 and later. (bug 386172)

Windows

  • Due to the lack of official timezone updates from Microsoft for the following Windows releases
    • Windows 98
    • Windows 98 SE
    • Windows ME
    • Windows NT 4.0
    • Windows 2000
    you may experience that events will be shown off by an hour.

    There are unofficial patches available for Windows 98/98 SE/ME and for Windows NT 4.0/2000.
    Note: These patches are not provided by the Mozilla Calendar Project and the developers can not guarantee that these patches will work as intended and do not have unintended side-effects.

Lightning with integrated Sun Java System Calendar Server (WCAP) support

Enhanced builds of Lightning with integrated WCAP support are available here. Note that unless you wish to use Lightning against a WCAP server, the regular vanilla builds of Lightning are probably what you are looking for. For more details about why this is being shipped separately, see this newsgroup posting.

Please refer to the WCAP Guide for further information about the enhancements.

The following resources contain useful information about Lightning:

Localizations

Thanks to the hard work of our localization teams, Lightning 0.7 ships with the following locales pre-installed:

  • Basque - Euskara
  • Catalan - Català
  • Chinese (Simplified) - 中文 (简体)
  • Czech - Čeština
  • Danish - Dansk
  • Dutch - Nederlands
  • English (United States)
  • French - Français
  • Georgian - ქართული
  • German - Deutsch
  • Hungarian - Magyar
  • Irish - Gaeilge
  • Italian - Italiano
  • Lithuanian - lietuvių
  • Macedonian - Македонски
  • Norwegian (Bokmål) - Norsk bokmål
  • Polish - Polski
  • Portuguese (Brazilian) - Português (do Brasil)
  • Portuguese (Portugal) - Português (Europeu)
  • Punjabi - ਪੰਜਾਬੀ
  • Russian - Русский
  • Slovak - Slovenský
  • Slovenian - Slovensko
  • Spanish (Latin America) - Español (de América)
  • Spanish (Spain) - Español (de España)
  • Swedish - Svenska
  • Turkish - Türkçe

Contributed Builds

These are unofficial builds and may be configured differently than the official Mozilla.org builds. They may also be optimized and/or tested for specific platforms.

Solaris builds (contributed by Sun Microsystems)

OS/2 builds

Linux x86-64 builds

Other Systems

Builds for platforms other than the trio officially offered by mozilla.org can be found on the FTP site.

Previous versions of the Release notes: 0.5 | 0.3.1 | 0.3 | 0.1