Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Programs with a large user-base, such as Mozilla Firefox, generally benefit from quick inclusion of new releases into the Ubuntu repositories. Right now, the current version of Firefox is 39.0, and I have version 39.0+build5-0ubuntu0.14.04.1 installed from the repositories - so all is golden.
However, this is not always true. Take the other slightly less-known application from Mozilla, the Mozilla Thunderbird email client. At the time of writing, Thunderbird is at version 38.1 since July 9, 2015 while the version in the repositories is merely a 31.8, to be precise 1:31.8.0+build1-0ubuntu0.14.04.1.
My personal gripe against Thunderbird’s version 31 is that is does not yet automatically include the calendar plugin, unlike version 38. So I would like to upgrade this program directly, instead of relying only on the Ubuntu repositories.
In the following description, we will see how to do this for Thunderbird, although the basics are extensible to other applications. As a sidenote, there is actually an Ubuntu Wiki page on installing new versions of Mozilla Thunderbird: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ThunderbirdNewVersion. Unfortunately, the information within is quite out-dated, since it refers to Ubuntu versions 10.04 and 10.10. But there is an interesting indication that is current in many respects, and that can be borne in mind: going beyond the repository version is specifically “NOT recommended by the Ubuntu Mozilla team due to interoperability concerns.” The operation is classified as “Medium difficulty, medium safety”, so may be outside of many users’ comfort zones.
So, what are our options to get access to the newest and greatest version of an application such as Thunderbird?
The first one that comes to mind (for an old-timer, at least) would be to download the source code and compile the program ourselves. This is definitely possible, open source being… open, with the source code readily available. However, it is also definitely going to mean downloading not only the source code, but also any tools necessary to do the compiling and linking (developer version of libraries, the compiler itself), and may require some navigation through library dependencies. So, while this path is certainly possible and results in an application that is perfectly integrated into our current system, it is perhaps not to be recommended unless we already enjoy software development in the C or C++ languages.
So, if we wish to avoid compiling from source code, we have at least two options to obtain a pre-compiled application in binary (executable) form.
One option is using the very same apt package system we are so used to, to perform installation. This means adding a supplementary repository to those we already have - Canonical’s main, universe, multiverse repositories and so forth. This new one is hosted by the Launchpad system, and has its hostpage at https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla-daily/+archive/ubuntu/ppa. As its name says, this repository holds daily builds of the most recent version of Thunderbird. So, as root, let us add this repository to our list with:
sudo bash
apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa
Now, refresh repository content lists with:
aptitude update
and consult the version of Thunderbird that is available:
aptitude show thunderbird-trunk
Please note the name of the main package for Thunderbird in this daily repository is not ‘thunderbird’, but ‘thunderbird-trunk’. This is so we can distinguish between the two versions. In my case, I get:
41.0~a1~hg20150519r17960.244718-0ubuntu1~umd1~trusty
Wow! We now have a version 41.0 available to us! And the version on the Mozilla web page is only up to a measly 39! So let’s test it out. In a terminal, type the command:
thunderbird-trunk
And watch it start up. The About dialog states quite clearly that this is, in fact, version 41.
However, it also states clearly something that should be a word to the wise: “Daily is experimental and may be unstable”. This is something I noticed when it was incapable of authenticating against my Gmail server - something which any version of Thunderbird has done with flying colors for the last many years. Luckily, the developers have had the good idea to have this daily version not operate directly on the existing mail data, so there is little chance of it trashing all those messages you have on your hard drive.
It is clear, however, that playing around with a daily version should be seen as working with beta grade software, at best. It is good enough to test out - but certainly not for production machines, or for ordinary users’ peace of mind.
The final option to download a stable version of Thunderbird is simply to consult the Download section of the project’s website, at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/all/.
Here, we find pre-compiled binaries for all three major desktop operating systems: Windows, OS-X and GNU/Linux. For the latter, make sure to choose the version corresponding to your preferred language. Also choose between 32-bit or 64-bit. If you are not sure which version of the Linux kernel you are running:
uname -a
and if you see “x86_64” in the information returned then this is a 64-bit kernel. “i386” or “i686” means a 32-bit kernel.
The file that is downloaded should be a compressed archive with the tar.bz2 extension. At the time of writing, the latest version was thunderbird-38.1.0.tar.bz2, rather less than the 41.0 numbering of the daily version.
Once downloaded, just click on the file and it will open in whatever archive compression/decompression utility is associated with this file extension. The exact program invoked will depend mostly on the desktop manager used, but, in many cases (Unity, Gnome, Cinnamon), it would be the Gnome archive manager file-roller. Once the compressed file is open in the archive utility, extract it, for example to the desktop. The archive utility can be closed. You should now have a folder on the desktop simply called “thunderbird”. This contains a large number of files, among which the main file (i.e. the Thunderbird program itself) is unsurprisingly also named “thunderbird”.
In any terminal, run
Desktop/thunderbird/thunderbird
and, voilà, the new version of Thunderbird should start up. It is worth noting that it should directly access your existing configuration and message files, which are not in this folder but in the hidden folder ~/.thunderbird. If you are not running Ubuntu in English, but in another language, simply substitute the correct name for your desktop (Bureau/thunderbird/thunderbird, etc.)
If this doesn’t work, the advantage of using a terminal to launch the newly-downloaded program is that any error messages will be visible for perusal.
For best results, it is recommended to run a fairly recent version of *Ubuntu. The most recent LTS version (now 14.04) or Linux Mint equivalent (17.2) should be fine with recent versions of Thunderbird. Otherwise, it is very possible that some library files are not in sufficiently recent versions for today’s Thunderbird to work.
To install this program to benefit all system users, best practice would involve moving it to the /opt directory. This needs to be done as root. So:
sudo bash
cd ~/Desktop
mv thunderbird /opt/
Now, let’s rename the existing version of Thunderbird, and link to the new version.
cd /usr/bin
mv thunderbird thunderbird-ubuntu
ln -s /opt/thunderbird/thunderbird
From this point on, all references to the Thunderbird program should point towards the newer version: this is the one that gets started when using the links in the menus, dock or status bar. The old version can still be accessed by typing the command
thunderbird-ubuntu
Needless to say, if the user should not be satisfied with the new program, it can safely be uninstalled and rolled back to the earlier version by issuing the following commands:
sudo bash
cd /usr/bin
rm thunderbird
mv thunderbird-ubuntu thunderbird
rm -r /opt/thunderbird