Calendar:Release Notes

Lightning 0.5 Release Notes

What's new in Lightning 0.5

Lightning 0.5 is the latest release of our calendar extension for Mozilla Thunderbird™. We recommend that all users upgrade to this latest version.

• Much more polished user interface in the calendar views
• Event invitations can be sent and received via iMIP/iTIP
• Working hours are back
• Automatic migration of data in Sunbird 0.2, iCal.app, and Evolution
• Much improved printing functionality
• Better integration into Mozilla Thunderbird (Printing, Undo/redo, Copy/paste)
• Support for Google Calendar (via the Google Calendar Provider extension)
• Vastly improved reliability
• Many performance improvements
• Many usability improvements

Downloading and Installing

Downloading Lightning 0.5

Mozilla.org provides Lightning for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X in a variety of languages. To get Lightning 0.5, download it here.

For builds for other systems and languages not provided, see the Contributed Builds section at the end of this document.

Installing Lightning

Lightning runs as an extension to either Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0 or the past release Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5.0.X.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR WINDOWS USERS: Install the updated timezones for Windows. Information on obtaining the updated timezones can be found in Microsoft Knowledge Base article 928388. Not updating your Windows timezones will result in unreliable and erroneous display and entry of time data! Be sure to do this!

IMPORTANT: If you have been using the old Calendar Extension, be sure to backup the ICS file that it put in your profile directory, and uninstall the Calendar Extension before installing Lightning. After you have installed Lightning, you can then import your old events and tasks from the backed up ICS file.

1. Right-click (Control-click on Mac) the download link and choose "Save Link As..." to download and save the .XPI file to your your hard disk.
2. In Mozilla Thunderbird, under the "Tools" menu, open the "Add-ons Manager" (Thunderbird 2.0) or the "Extensions Manager" (Thunderbird 1.5).
3. Click the "Install" button, locate and select the .XPI file you downloaded in step 1, and click "OK".
4. Restart Mozilla Thunderbird.

Known Issues

Before using Lightning 0.5, it is strongly encouraged that you read the following limitations that apply to this release.

• Sunbird: Because of architectural changes in the Mozilla core code, Sunbird 0.5 will not work on Windows 95, Windows 98 or Windows ME
• Lightning: Lightning will attempt to guess your timezone on startup. As this is only a best guess, and many timezones have changed, you must manually set the timezone in Preferences/Options before entering data. Not doing so may cause events to appear at the wrong time.
• Common: It is impossible to load several calendars with different passwords on same server (bug 247486)
• Common: Date and time from events that originate from .ICS files created by other applications, may be miscalculated, because non-native timezones are not appropriately handled (bug 314339)
• Common: Events from other calendar applications with a DURATION set but no DTEND (end date) will have the DURATION removed and a calculated end date added when exported. (bug 317786)
• Common: Portions of attachments on events and tasks may be lost when uploading to a remote calendar. (bug 319909)
• Common: "By weekday" and "by day" recurrence types (such as "recur on the last weekday of the month") are not supported. (bug 322458)
• Lightning: Lightning is not usable on Japanese versions of Windows with Thunderbird 1.5. (bug 330121)
• Common: All-day events are occasionally displayed on two days when they should only be displayed on one. (bug 333363)
• Common: Occurrences of recurring events may disappear when dragging and dropping them. (bug 336952)
• Common: The Event/Task Dialog will always show times in the operating system timezone regardless of the cosen timezone preferences (bug 337191)
• Common: Enabling the "Automatic proxy configuration URL" preference will cause remote calendars to fail to load on startup. To workaround this bug, execute "Reload Remote Calendars" after the application has started up or use "Manual proxy configuration". (bug 338527)
• Common: Because of bugs in older X servers, there are unavoidable race conditions in drag and drop in month view on Un*x desktops, which may lead to a complete freeze. This has been noticed especially in situations, where people were connecting to a remote X session. (bug 348009)
• Lightning: When installed in Thunderbird 1.5, Lightning can not read iMIP invitations sent from users of Apple iCal.app. However, this works correctly in Thunderbird 2.0. (bug 351997)
• Common: Exceptions will be ignored when subscribing to an ics calendar created on Sunbird 0.2 (bug 352795)
• Common: When using timezones with a negative offset there may be errors when calculating recurrences with all-day and non-allday items (bug 353887)
• Common: There are intermittent issues when modifying occurrences of recurring events via iMIP and Copy/Paste. (bug 354578)
• Common: Unifinder and task view are empty when using a CalDAV calendar. (bug 356021)
• Common: Automatic reloading and and/or refreshing and reloading is not possible on CalDAV calendars. This issue is more severe on the BedeWork CalDav server than on Cosmo. (bug 361520)
• Common: Due to the complexity of the Daylight Savings Time rules for the /Asia/Jerusalem timezone, .ICS files which contain events in the /Asia/Jerusalem timezone may fail to import into Microsoft Outlook 2003 (as well as earlier versions). These files should import successfully into Microsoft Outlook 2007. (bug 367378)
• Common: Events on WebCalendar servers cannot be deleted through the UI. (bug 371946)

Lightning with integrated Sun Java System Calendar Server (WCAP) support

Enhanced builds of Lightning with integrated WCAP support are available here. Note that unless you wish to use Lightning against a WCAP server, the regular vanilla builds of Lightning are probably what you are looking for. For more details about why this is being shipped separately, see this newsgroup posting.

Please refer to the Guide WCAP Guide for further information about the enhancements.

Other Resources and Links

The following resources contain useful information about Lightning:

• Lightning Help
• Developer Information

Localizations

Thanks to the hard work of our localization teams, Lightning 0.5 ships with the following locales pre-installed:

• Basque — Euskara
• Catalan — Català
• Czech — Čeština
• Danish — Dansk
• Dutch — Nederlands
• English (United States)
• French — Français
• German — Deutsch
• Irish - Gaeilge
• Hungarian — Magyar
• Italian — Italiano
• Mongolian — Монгол
• Macedonian - Македонски
• Norwegian (Bokmål) - Norsk bokmål
• Polish — Polski
• Portuguese (Brazilian) - Português (do Brasil)
• Punjabi - ਪੰਜਾਬੀ
• Russian — Русский
• Slovak — Slovenský
• Slovenian — Slovensko
• Spanish (Spain) — Español (de España)
• Swedish - Svenska

Contributed Builds

These are unofficial builds and may be configured differently than the official Mozilla.org builds. They may also be optimized and/or tested for specific platforms.

Other Systems

Builds for platforms other than the trio officially offered by Mozilla.org can be found on the FTP site.

Previous versions of the Release notes: 0.3.1 0.3 0.1