Sunbird Portable 0.2 Rev 5 and 0.3 Alpha 2 Released

John T. Haller's picture
Submitted by John T. Haller on July 31, 2006 - 2:10pm

Firefox logoPortable Sunbird is now Mozilla Sunbird - Portable Edition (Sunbird Portable among friends), and versions 0.2 Revision 5 and 0.3 Alpha 2 have been released. For the unfamiliar, Sunbird Portable is the handy Mozilla Sunbird calendar packaged with a PortableApps.com Launcher as a portable app, so you can take your schedule and to-do lists with you. This new release adds in a ton of new features, including: the ability to run from a CD, in-place upgrades, lots of handy bug fixes, support for running within Wine on *nix and more. Read on for all the details...

Portable Sunbird becomes Mozilla Sunbird - Portable Edition

The first thing you'll notice is that the name has been changed from Portable Sunbird to Mozilla Sunbird - Portable Edition (or, Sunbird Portable, for short). Why the name change? As with the new Firefox Portable release, in working closely with Mozilla, we determined that a name that fully respected Mozilla's trademarks and branding was much more in order. The new name is meant to indicate that it is an official copy of Mozilla Sunbird within and that it includes add-ons by PortableApps.com that allow it to work its best portably.

What's New?

So, what's new? Quite a few things:

Live/CD Support - Sunbird Portable supports running from a CD or other read-only media right out of the box. You just need change one setting to do it, too. Best of all, Sunbird Portable will even detect if you're running from a read-only location and offer to run locally, which is handy if you have a write-protection switch on your flash drive or memory card. Full details are in the support topic on Running from a CD.

In-Place Upgrades - Sunbird Portable now supports the ability to do what we're calling an "in-place upgrade". This means that you can extract it right over an existing installation of Sunbird Portable without losing any of your existing data and it'll Just Work. This will apply to future releases of Sunbird Portable as you'll still need to manually update due to the directory changes.

Wine Support in Linux/Debian/Unix - Sunbird Portable now supports the ability to download, install and run within Wine. That means you can run it right within your *nix of choice without any changes. You can even copy calendars back and forth to your local copy of Sunbird.

Two Releases In One

As with the recent Firefox Portable release, multiple versions are being made available: both the stable 0.2 release and the 0.3 Alpha 2 release for testers. You can grab either one from the Sunbird Portable homepage.

Mozilla®, Sunbird™ and the Sunbird logo are trademarks of the Mozilla Foundation and are used with permission.

Story Topic:

Comments

The name has been changed to Mozilla Firefox - Portable Edition, John? You might want to fix that ;). Copy & Paste is evil, I tell you!

-
Lauren She eats everything! It's like having a goat. A giant, two-Godzillaton goat.
maggie Hey, I resent that remark! I only weigh ONE Godzillaton!
~ Spectacles: Bruce's Story

John T. Haller's picture

Thanks. Indeed... the evils of copy n paste.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

Do these apps work with the U3 technology?

John T. Haller's picture

These applications all run independently of U3. You can install and use them directly from any drive you'd like (including U3 drives, iPods, CDs, regular flash drives, etc), and they leave nothing behind on the systems you run them on. They will not appear in the U3 Launchpad, however, as they are not U3Ps. Only Firefox Portable, Thunderbird Portable and OpenOffice.org Portable have been made into U3 apps (as Firefox for U3, Thunderbird for U3 and OpenOffice.org for U3) and U3 funded the development of these. The future of porting other applications to U3 is currently undecided.

Please post any other questions in the support forums, not as comments on a news story.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

I've long had my calendar files stored in place, to make it easier to find when connecting it to different Sunbird variants. However with Sunbird Portable, it seems to insist that they live at:
SunbirdPortable\Data\profile\Calendar

All of my attempts to move them a path outside of SunbirdPortable\ results in SunbirdPortable changing their locations back to the default (and ending in empty calendars).

Is this intended?

John T. Haller's picture

The paths have to be relative to the launcher as they must be alered on every single launch to take into account the new drive letter and, possibly, path if you moved where it is. As such, you need to place them within your profile folder.

If you have further support questions, please post them in the support forum, not as a comment on a news story.

Sigh... I just noticed you asked there, too... Please only post a question ONCE

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

I don't know if you guys noticed, but the download for the 0.3 Alpha 2 release doesn't work.

Try ZIP Download - it's working...

John T. Haller's picture

There was a typo in the URL. It's fixed.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

Thanks, I'll download Portable Sunbird now and will test this week. Wink
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Greetings from Spain.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lphant

Both versions seem to crash on my homesystem (FreeBSD-CURRENT) using wine (latest version).

wine: Call from 0x51fb21 to unimplemented function USER32.dll.BlockInput, aborting
wine: Unimplemented function USER32.dll.BlockInput called at address 0x51fb21 (thread 000d), starting debugger...
WineDbg starting on pid 0xc

Any ideas how to fix?

John T. Haller's picture

No tech support is handled as comments on a news story. Check the forums.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

This means that Sunbird is using a Win32 function (BlockInput) that your version of wine doesn't implement. Not much you can do about it.

-
< ExplosivePrincess 1.5 Atomic Bomb Edition >
warning: keep explosiveprincess away from children