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I'm using Mozilla's Thunderbird with thunderbird-locale-de and xul-ext-lightning for calendaring.

Unfortunately, the lightning extension seems not to be translated - while the rest of thunderbird is.

Is there a way to get the calendar part of thunderbird translated to german?

Willie Robert
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cweiske
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3 Answers3

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The package xul-ext-lightning in the Ubuntu repository does not support the German language.

To add German language support:

  1. Remove the package

    sudo apt-get remove xul-ext-lightning

  2. Use the Add-Ons page to install the add-on.

Fabby
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A.B.
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I have found a solution, but I have no idea why it works. Information about the changes in how Lightning is treated post-Thunderbird-60 is a little thin on the ground.

Background

  • it cannot be installed through the add-on system
  • it doesn’t magically appear by removing the old add-on and restarting, which people in Mozilla support forums suggest as a solution (possibly because how it’s packaged in Ubuntu hasn’t caught up with the change yet)
  • it can be installed through a package (xul-ext-lightning) as described by A.B. but the interface will be in English, not your chosen Thunderbird language

Having done a fresh Irish language install of Ubuntu when 18.04 arrived, I did have both Thunderbird and Lightning (installed through add-on system) in Irish until one day Lightning was somehow auto-updated to version 60 even though Thunderbird was still on 57(?!). It stopped working at that point. I eventually removed the Lightning add-on and found the system package which reinstalled Lightning, but in English.

Solution

I’d seen suggestions that the Thunderbird people wanted you to download it as a standalone, so I thought I’d try that.

  1. Downloaded localised Thunderbird
  2. Extracted under ~/bin
  3. Ran it from a file manager — Lightning is bundled and localised!
  4. Ran system version of Thunderbird — Lightning is localised!
  5. Deleted downloaded Thunderbird and ran system version — Lightning still localised!

I’m guessing this has changed a config file somewhere.

You could also remove the system version and use the downloaded version instead, but I’m unsure of how updates are handled (if at all). Once again, on Mozilla support people will say that it is updated automatically, but I’m not sure there’s much experience of Linux there.

Moilleadóir
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You can do it the easy way by going to the link below:

https://thingsthemselves.com/localized-lightning-for-thunderbird-60-on-linux/

And downloadning and installing the corresponding .xpi extension for your Thunderbird version. Worked nicely for me.

EDIT: now including the main parts of the article so people can follow instructions, as requested.

Download the Linux (or Linux 64-bit, either one will work) version of Thunderbird for your language from the Thunderbird site. This should be a .tar.bz2 archive.

Note: Specific versions of Lightning are paired with specific versions of Thunderbird. If you are not using the latest version of Thunderbird (60.2.1 at the time of this writing), you can download the release package for your version at Mozilla’s archive site.

Expand the .tar.bz2 archive, and in the thunderbird/distribution/extensions directory, you will find the .xpi package for the Lightning extension ({e2fda1a4-762b-4020-b5ad-a41df1933103}.xpi).

Download Lightning from (...) Dropbox shared folder

In the interest of saving time, (...) select the version of Thunderbird you are using, then download Lightning for your locale: (N.B.: due to URL limits, I put here only the three last ones from the list)

Thunderbird 60.8.0 – Lightning 6.2.8
Thunderbird 60.9.0 – Lightning 6.2.9
Thunderbird 68.0 – Lightning 68.0

Staying updated

Unfortunately, installing Lightning this way means automatic updates do not work. (...)

Eliseu Carvalho
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