How to Install Thunderbird 5 (beta) in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal?

Apart from the Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird is the other widely used GNU e-mail client/application from the Mozilla foundation. Although you won't get Thunderbird as the default e-mail client in Ubuntu but you can install it nonetheless. If however you install it from the official repositories then you won't be getting the latest beta version (5) which was released few days ago and some of the new features as well.

Although you certainly won't be having a huge list of cool new features and if you don't like to use a beta channel then you should just stick to the stable release. But for some reason they've skipped the version "4" and jumped to the "5" instead and it does bring few improvements nonetheless.

*. New addon and extension manager API (when they release it officially they'll be changing the GUI as well).

*. Easily drag tabs from one window to the other.

*. Enhanced setting up wizard.

Image via: ubuntuforums

*. Attached file sizes are shown alongside them.

*. Better troubleshooting.

*. Load plugins within RSS Feeds.

*. And few other bug fixes and minor improvements.

You can install Thunderbird 5.0 beta in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 10.10, 10.04 or in the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha by entering the below command in your Terminal (we're using the Mozilla's official PPA channel).

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/thunderbird-next

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install thunderbird

That should do it. 

Evolution 3 Arrives for Gnome Shell Desktop Users!

I think most know that Gnome 3 by default uses the GTK3 tool-kit. But other applications written in GTK2+, etc should work with GTK3 without any issues according to Gnome developers. But whenever the major utilities release their support for GTK3... we should update to that version as well because it adds more stability/compatibility, in general.

Few days ago, Evolution, the fully featured e-mail client for Gnome desktop has updated to their latest version - 3. As I said before, this is a fully featured mail client which comes with a powerful GUI interface for managing/mapping ports, calender, address book, etc.

Although this new version does not bring any new features... other than few bug fixes but as said before, this will integrate better with your existing Gnome 3 nonetheless.

So, if you don't use this much often, then I don't think that you have to update this.. but still if you use it from time to time or a faithful regular user, then it's better to do so :). If you use Gnome 3 in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, then you can install Evolution 3 by using a PPA channel.

To do that, simply open your Terminal and issue the below command.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:danilo/evolution
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install evolution