Lightning 0.5 Release Notes

What's new in Lightning 0.5

Lightning 0.5 is the latest release of our calendar extension for Mozilla Thunderbird™. We recommend that all users upgrade to this latest version.

• Much more polished user interface in the calendar views
• Event invitations can be sent and received via iMIP/iTIP
• Working hours are back
• Automatic migration of data in Sunbird 0.2, iCal.app, and Evolution
• Much improved printing functionality
• Better integration into Mozilla Thunderbird (Printing, Undo/redo, Copy/paste)
• Support for Google Calendar (via the Google Calendar Provider extension)
• Vastly improved reliability
• Many performance improvements
• Many usability improvements

Downloading and Installing

Downloading Lightning 0.5

Mozilla.org provides Lightning for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X in a variety of languages. To get Lightning 0.5, 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 or the past 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 928388. 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

Before using Lightning 0.5, it is strongly encouraged that you read the following limitations that apply to this release. Other important known problems in this release are listed on this page. Please read both lists before reporting any new bugs.

• Lightning will attempt to guess your timezone on startup. As this is only a best guess, and many timezones have changed, you must manually set the timezone in Preferences/Options before entering data. Not doing so may cause events to appear at the wrong time.
• You may experience that events will be shown off by an hour on older Windows releases. This is due to the lack of official timezone updates from Microsoft and applies to the following Windows releases:
  • Windows 98
  • Windows 98 SE
  • Windows NT 4.0
  • Windows 2000
• 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)

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 Guide WCAP Guide for further information about the enhancements.

Other Resources and Links

The following resources contain useful information about Lightning:

• Lightning Help
• Developer Information

Localizations

Thanks to the hard work of our localization teams, Lightning 0.5 ships with the following locales pre-installed:

• Basque — Euskara
• Catalan — Català
• Czech — Čeština
• Danish — Dansk
• Dutch — Nederlands
• English (United States)
• French — Français
• German — Deutsch
• Irish - Gaeilge
• Hungarian — Magyar
• Italian — Italiano
• Mongolian — Монгол
• Macedonian - Македонски
• Norwegian (Bokmål) - Norsk bokmål
• Polish — Polski
• Portuguese (Brazilian) - Português (do Brasil)
• Punjabi - ਪੰਜਾਬੀ
• Russian — Русский
• Slovak — Slovenský
• Slovenian — Slovensko
• Spanish (Spain) — Español (de España)
• Swedish - Svenska

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.

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: 0.3.1 0.3 0.1