Getting Mozilla's Lightning/Iceowl to work in Thunderbird/Icedove

We all know that due to the copyright of the Mozilla Foundation/Corporation/whatever-it-is, that the Debian project decided awhile ago to drop the copyrighted logos and names from the very popular Mozilla products, hence:

Firefox = Iceweasel
Thunderbird = Icedove
Seamonkey = Iceape

And it turns out the Mozilla standalone calendar application Sunbird as well as the Lightning version of that app that works inside of Thunderbird/Icedove has its own Debian-dubbed name:

Iceowl.

It took me long enough to figure that out.

I had been using Lightning in my Ubuntu Karmic installation ... a newer version presumably because when I went into the Synaptic Package Manager to install the Iceowl extension for Icedove (see ... I've dropped the Mozilla names entirely and am now speaking Debian), I added Iceowl, restarted Icedove and was told by a dialog that my data in Lightning (yep, back to Mozilla-speak) was created by a newer version of the extension and would be corrupted, hence Icedove/Thunderbird was turning Iceowl/Lightning off to avoid such corruption.

Now I only had a couple of things in Iceowl/Lightning — standing meetings that I'm always forgetting about — so losing any data didn't concern me.

A big of Googling told me that files in my .mozilla-thunderbird profile folder ending with .sbd held the Lightning/Iceowl data. I pulled the following from my profile folder and parked them elsewhere, lest I need them again.

The two files I removed were:

storage.sbd
storage.sbd.msf

Then I started Icedove again. I had Iceowl/Lightning working, but just as in Ubuntu, I couldn't create an "event" on the calendar, rendering it useless, when I installed directly from Mozilla's extension/add-on site. In the case of Ubuntu, Lightning only worked when I used Synaptic to install from the Ubuntu repositories.

But in Debian Lenny, I only used the repositories, no Mozilla-direct files at all.

Back to the Googling. I quickly learned from Mozilla's Calendar Weblog that there's a library package that must be installed before you install Lightning/Iceowl:

You need to install the libstdc++5 package from the repositories first. Reinstall Lightning afterwards. Posted by: ssitter | April 10, 2008 7:04 AM

I completely uninstalled Iceowl, then used Synaptic to install libstdc++5 and then installed iceowl-extension.

I launched Icedove, and right away the calendar display a) looked a whole lot better (it was looking a little funky previously) and b) actually worked, allowing me to create new "events" and trigger alarms for said events.

I'm puzzled. I checked the dependencies of iceowl-extension, and it lists the following:

Depends: libstdc++6 (>=4.1.1)

A quick check of Synaptic shows that I have both libstdc++6 and libstdc++5 installed.

I'm not quite sure what's going on.

There is a Debian bug report on this very issue, #547616 iceowl-extension: Can't open, add or use calendar and tasks.

I replied to the bug with my "findings."