Patrick Micka

One of the things I’ve never really been fond of, on any computer, are desktop email clients. This is especially the case when they come preloaded on the machine. I find that using Gmail fulfills most of my needs, however, if you’re on a Linux machine and simply must have a desktop email client I highly recommend using Mozilla’s Thunderbird over Evolution.

First, grab your preferred version here.

Next, you’re going to need to open a terminal and enter the following two commands to extract the archive you just downloaded:

cd ~/Desktop
tar xfvj thunderbird-3.0b1.tar.bz2

You don’t need the original archive any longer, so delete with the following command:

rm ~/Desktop/thunderbird-3.0b1.tar.bz2

After you’ve unpacked the archive enter the following command to move it to a more convenient location:

mv thunderbird /opt/thunderbird3.0b1

Everything should be in order now, so let’s move to the directory and make sure it works:

cd /opt/thunderbird3.0b1/

Finally, run the following command to launch Thunderbird:

./thunderbird

If everything works fine and you’ve set up your email accounts with little frustration. Next, you may want to create a clickable icon on your desktop so you don’t have launch the program via the command line. To create a desktop icon, simply right-click and select “Create Launcher…” Then follow out the dialogue box with the following information:

Type: Application

Name: Thunderbird 3.0b

Command: /opt/thunderbird3.0b1/thunderbird

Commont: This launches Thunderbird 3.0 beta.

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1. HowTo: Install Firefox 3.5 in Ubuntu If you

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