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These Release Notes cover what's new, download and installation instructions and known issues for Sunbird 0.8. Please read these notes and the bug filing instructions before reporting any bugs to Bugzilla.

What's New in Sunbird 0.8

Sunbird 0.8 is the latest release of our standalone calendar application. We recommend that all users upgrade to this latest version.

The following features have been added to Sunbird 0.8:

  • A new icon set which matches more closely the icon style of other mozilla applications
  • Category colors are now shown next to an event box, giving users a much better overview of their differently categorized events
  • Events with alarms now have a visual indicator showing an alarm bell
  • A totally overhauled alarm dialog
  • Sunbird now recognizes the timezone definitions in .ics files created by other applications. This fixes the longstanding issue of Sunbird miscalculating the date or time of events contained in those files
  • The timezone guessing has been significantly improved
  • Sunbird now contains experimental support for viewing remote calendars offline. This feature has known bugs and is included for testing purposes only
  • Sunbird contains several performance fixes, which should improve working with larger calendar files
  • You can now define for each of your calendars, whether you want to be notified of alarms for events in these calendars or not
  • A full list of changes that have gone into this release can be found on The Rumbling Edge website

Release Date: April 04, 2008

Downloading and Installing

System Requirements

Before installing, make sure your computer meets the system requirements. Mac OS X users must have Mac OS X 10.2 or greater, and Windows users must have Windows XP or later.

Windows releases prior to Windows XP are working but may display event times erroneously due to outdated timezone on the operating system level. This can be fixed using unofficial patches. Users should read the known issues section for more information.

Downloading Sunbird 0.8

Mozilla.org provides Sunbird for Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X in a variety of languages. To get Sunbird 0.8, download it here.

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

Installing Sunbird

Once you have downloaded Sunbird, follow these instructions to install:

Windows

IMPORTANT: 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!

Before installing, uninstall any previous versions of Sunbird you may have. From the Start menu, choose Control Panel. When the Control Panel appears, double click Add/Remove Programs. Select "Mozilla Sunbird" in the list and click Removeto uninstall.

Then, double click the installer to start the install.

Mac OS X

Once you have downloaded the sunbird-0.8.en-US.mac.dmg file, double click the Sunbird Disk Image to open it in Finder, and then drag the Sunbird application onto your hard disk. Drag the icon to your Dock if you want it to appear there.

Linux/GTK2 and Solaris/GTK2

Extract the tarball in the directory where you want to install Sunbird:

tar -xzvf sunbird-0.8.en-US.linux-i686.tar.gz

This will create a sunbird subdirectory of that directory.

Other Platforms

Extract the compressed archive and run sunbird.

Uninstalling Sunbird

To uninstall Sunbird, follow these instructions:

Windows

From the Start menu, choose Control Panel. When the Control Panel appears, double click Add/Remove Programs. Find "Mozilla Sunbird (0.8)" in the list and click Remove to uninstall.

Mac OS X

Drag the Sunbird application to the Trash.

Others

Remove the sunbird folder.

These instructions leave your profile in place in case you install Sunbird again in the future. If you wish to remove your profile folder, remove the location described below in the "Profile Folder" section. Note that by doing this you are destroying all of your calendars, saved passwords, settings and other information and should you decide to use Sunbird again you will be starting with a clean profile.

 

Other Information

Profile Folder

Sunbird stores your user data in one of the following locations:

Windows 2000, XP Documents and Settings\<UserName>\Application Data\Mozilla\Sunbird
Mac OS X ~/Library/Application Support/Sunbird
Linux and Solaris ~/.mozilla/sunbird

 

Known Issues

This list covers some of the known issues with Sunbird 0.8.

All Systems

  • Sunbird 0.8 will attempt to guess your timezone on startup. As this is only a best guess, you must manually set the timezone in the Preferences/Options dialog before entering data. Not doing so may cause events to appear at the wrong time
  • The experimental support for viewing remote calendars offline has various known issues in the area of performance and calendar data display. It does not support the offline editing of events and tasks
  • It is impossible to load several calendars with different passwords on the same server (bug 247486)
  • Portions of attachments on events and tasks may be lost when uploading to a remote calendar (bug 319909)
  • "By weekday" and "by day" recurrence types (such as "recur on the last weekday of the month") are not supported (bug 322458)
  • Concurrent editing of remote calendars by multiple users can lose data (bug 329570)
  • Enabling the "Automatic proxy configuration URL" preference will cause remote calendars to fail to load on startup. To workaround this bug, execute "Reload Remote Calendars" after the application has started up or use "Manual proxy configuration" (bug 338527)
  • There are intermittent issues when modifying occurrences of recurring events via Copy/Paste (bug 354578)
  • Under some instances the "Do you want to save your changes" dialog does not come up when editing events in the event dialog (bug 364387)
  • Due to the complexity of the Daylight Savings Time rules for the /Asia/Jerusalem timezone, .ICS files which contain events in the /Asia/Jerusalem timezone may fail to import into Microsoft Outlook 2003 (as well as earlier versions). These files should import successfully into Microsoft Outlook 2007 (bug 367378)
  • Events deleted in Sunbird will not be deleted on a OpenXchange server unless "enabledelete=yes" is added as a GET parameter (bug 369076)
  • Multiple windows of the same single event can be opened from the Agenda, the task list and the unifinder (bug 373251)
  • The event box tooltips will lose the last 1 or 2 characters of the longest line on Windows with the Luna theme or some 3rd party theme (bug 390313)
  • Creating two events or tasks with a length of zero minutes on the same date and on different calendars will lead to only one of those events or tasks being visible (bug 394004)
  • Local calendars might break, if you upgrade from a 0.8pre nightly build to the 0.8 release build. See this newsgroups thread for information on how to fix this. (bug 410931)
  • Adding events or tasks to a CalDAV calendar whose display has been turned off, will not re-enable the display of that calendar. (bug 421986)

Linux and Solaris

  • Because of bugs in older X servers, there are unavoidable race conditions in drag and drop in month view on Un*x desktops, which may lead to a complete freeze. This has been noticed especially in situations where people were connecting to a remote X session (bug 348009)

Windows

  • Printing a calendar does not work on the first attempt, but will work on the following attempts. (bug 351581)
  • 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.

Troubleshooting

  • Poorly designed or incompatible Add-ons can cause problems with Sunbird, including making it crash and slowing down calendar display. If you encounter strange problems relating to parts of Sunbird no longer working, Sunbird not starting, windows with strange or distorted appearance, degraded performance, etc, you may be suffering from Add-on trouble.
    Restart Sunbird in Safe Mode. On Windows, start using the "Safe Mode" shortcut created in your Start menu or by running sunbird.exe -safe-mode. On Linux, start with ./sunbird -safe-mode and on Mac OS X, run the following command in Terminal:
    /Applications/Sunbird.app/Contents/MacOS/sunbird-bin -safe-mode When Sunbird is started in Safe Mode, all Add-ons are disabled. Disable the Add-on that is causing trouble and then start normally.

 

The following resources contain useful information about Sunbird:

 

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 (contributed by Peter Weilbacher)

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.

Localized Builds

Many localized builds are now produced and distributed by mozilla.org on behalf of their authors. View All Systems and Languages to see the set of official builds that we offer.

Previous versions of the Release notes: 0.7 | 0.5 | 0.3.1 | 0.3 | 0.3a2 | 0.3a1
Sunbird® and the Sunbird logo are trademarks of the Mozilla Foundation. All rights reserved.