Spicebird wakes up from hibernation, brings a lot of changes

Approximately 12 months after it released its beta version, Synovel sponsored PIM client has released its first stable version, Spicebird 0.8.  To give a little bit of details on what Spicebird is: “Spicebird is a collaboration application built on top of various other open source software, mainly the Mozilla Platform and Thunderbird” . This cross platform client, integrates the goodness of Mozilla Thunderbird mail client and its popular calendar application , lightning into one client , along with the integration of telepathy to support chat protocols. Supported chat protocols are MSN, Google talk, Yahoo, IRC , XMPP , ICQ and GroupWise.

It provides an excellent dashboard with capabilities to support RSS feeds and google gadgets . The new version has improved support for addons, however, presently only personas addon is the only one that I have been able to get working. Nevertheless, its shows good promise for integrating thunderbird’s addons.

Builds for 32 bit windows and 32 and 64 bit for Linux machines are available from www.spicebird.com/download. However, no .deb or .rpm files are available currently. You should be able to just download, extract the files and double click on spicebird to get it going.

Follow the steps below to get Spicebird (32/64bit) integrated into the system.

Open a terminal and type the following for your approprite system

64bit system:
cd ~
wget http://files.spicebird.org/pub/spicebird.org/spicebird/releases/0.8/linux-x86_64/en-US/spicebird-0.8.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2
sudo tar -xvf spicebird-0.8.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2 -C /opt
sudo ln -s /opt/spicebird/spicebird /usr/bin/spicebird


32bit system:
cd ~
wget http://files.spicebird.org/pub/spicebird.org/spicebird/releases/0.8/linux-i686/en-US/spicebird-0.8.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2
sudo tar -xvf spicebird-0.8.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2 -C /opt
sudo ln -s /opt/spicebird/spicebird /usr/bin/spicebird

To add a Launcher, right click on the panel, click on Add to Panel, click on Custom Application Launcher and click Add.

Type the Spicebird as the name and under command type spicebird. Click ok to save the launcher. If you want to select an icon, click the launcher icon and navigate to /opt/spicebird/icons and select the spicebird icon.