Finally!! Lightning 0.5 & Sunbird 0.5 release is out

Finally, the 0.5 release has been completed.

About two months after our initial scheduled release date, Lightning 0.5 and Sunbird 0.5 bring us a huge step closer to our 1.0 release, which is scheduled for the first half of 2008.

Notable improvements of this release are:

  • Much more polished user interface in the calendar views
  • Event invitations can be sent and received via iMIP/iTIP (Lightning only)
  • Working hours are back
  • Automatic migration of data in Sunbird 0.2, iCal.app, and Evolution
  • Much improved printing functionality
  • Better integration of Lightning into Mozilla Thunderbird (Printing, Undo/redo, Copy/paste)
  • Support for Google Calendar (via the Google Calendar Provider extension)
  • and much more. A full list of changes that have gone into this release can be found on The Rumbling Edge weblog.

Lightning 0.5 and Sunbird 0.5 are available for Windows, Mac OS X (universal builds) and Linux in 22 different languages including English.

Please use the following links to download the release:

Please read the release notes for Lightning 0.5 and Sunbird 0.5 before downloading.

Thank you again to all our developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters. We would not be able to do this without your assistance!

28 comments

  1. I have been anxiously looking forward to this. Lightining looks great, but Sunbird won’t download at the moment (it just forwards me to Mozilla.org and downloads nothing). I can’t wait to give that a test drive too once the download link is fixed.
    This is a fantastic job and blessing. Another giant step towards getting Outlook off of my system! Thanks for the tremendous work, guys and gals.

  2. Hi
    Sorry but the link “other laguage” don’t work

  3. I had the same trouble as Mac above. However, I was able to download the file, after some navigating, from the FTP link on this blog’s main page.
    For what it’s worth, I ended up here: http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/sunbird/releases/0.5/

  4. @ Mac, Kurikuri
    It needs some time to get the builds to all mirror severs. The links should hopefully work correct within some hours.

  5. Thanks!
    By the way, will auto update notify me for 0.5rc1 to 0.5?

  6. I tried downloading the Sunbird installer and received a notification from VirusScan that it contained “new malware.bm”. Anyone else get this message or something similar?

  7. Great job, thanks to you all…

  8. @caurton
    I checked the installer on virustotal.com and all but one scanner rate it clean. Maybe a false positive? See result:

  9. Note: Don’t trust the Preview option. Here is the link to the results: [http://img412.imageshack.us/my.php?image=vtgf6.png]

  10. Buena extensi�n para los que no queramos instalar Sunbird!

  11. Big thank you for your great job! I’ve been using sunbird for many months now an never had any serious problems with it.

  12. Anyone know why thunderbird doesnt show a event list above the calendar like sunbird does?

  13. Sorry… I’m sure this is a dumb question:
    After installing the appropriate extension, how do I go about integrating my Google Calendar into lightning?

  14. Duh… I worked it out now! (File -> new calendar -> network -> etc)

  15. This rocks… I can’t believe this is a .5 release. I guess I’ve just gotten used to crappy programs (M$ if you know what I mean).
    You guys rock… great job

  16. I launched Thunderbird, and it told me that the 0.5 version was out. It automatically downloaded it and asked me to restart Thunderbird. Upon restarting, it just crashes. I can launch it through safe mode, and disable the extension. I fear that it has also deleted my calendar data.
    Any comments?
    -R

  17. For the benefit of anyone else with the same problem, the conflict was caused by BirdieSync. I updated BirdieSync’s extension and everything went back to normal.

  18. Still having *major* issues with this release and calendars disappearing since RC2. (WinXP, TB 2.0.0.4 and 20ish .ics WebDAV files)
    I’ve been pushing for our company to at least try this and now have egg on my face.
    Off to try and work out Bugzilla again…

  19. Great job and wonderful progress. The team is to be congratulated.
    However, its useless to me and many others until it supports sync to palm. I look forward to the day when I can use Thunderbird/Lightning to manage my emails, contacts, to dos and notes.
    I paid for Outlook to do those tasks and I’d pay for T/L (or anything else) to do it better .

  20. Hello! This looks nice! SO, now after the celebration is almost over. What are the plans? What is going to be done and when? A summary of a roadmap would be nice.

  21. Hi folks
    Echoing shollomon, does anyone know if whoever works on the palmsync extension is to get it working with sunbird or lightning? or thunderbird2 for that matter?
    Very much enjoying all your work, thanks a mill
    Roger

  22. Having same problem as Nev. My WebDav calendar entries disappear after viewing them once. They will re-appear after a relaunch of Thunderbird but then disappear again after visiting e.g. Inbox.
    It seems that the calendar plugin does ask login any more (as required by my WebDAV configuration). Also the entries I add, do not seem to get stored, i.e. they are gone after the relaunch.
    I’m using Mac OS X 10.4.10 and Thunderbird version 2.0.0.0 (20070326).

  23. Nils Olav Bekken

    Great extension, but just one question, I tried to drag and drop an event and it changed start time -2 hours – is this a bug? dont know if its related to my computers timezone GMT+2.
    I’m using Win XP and Thunderbird 2.0.0.4 (20070604)

  24. Howdy,
    Yesterday I was downloading the Thunderbird & Lightning updates and reviewing some of the docs found on the Rumbling Edge, however today all I can find is the Release notes for Sunbird.
    The Lightning notes mentioned new features such as a cleaner way of displaying the mini-calendar in the folders area as I have a long list of folders and must scroll quite a ways to access all my folders.
    I ask as I am creating documentation and because I cannot find how to enable this Display change (after checking the menu items).
    Otherwise great work everyone!

  25. Sorry about that. I found what I was looking for here:
    http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar/ though I’m still unclear on how to activate this control.
    The page mentioned above indicates that the bug was fixed on June 30th, and it appears that the Lightning release I’ve downloaded was 0.5, build 2007062404. Is there somewhere I can grab the build that contains the patch mentioned here:
    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=371916
    Is this a nightly build that I need to switch to? If so, is there any way of knowing when this particular fix will be made general release?
    Thanks!

  26. It appears the page http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar/ has been updated since my last post. All questions have now been answered.
    Cheers!

  27. Sorry (or am I secretly glad) to see I’m not the only one suffering the disappearing remote calendars. Also, I can add events to them, but I can’t edit or delete events reliably. Both Mac and Windows clients, server: Apache/1.3.33 (Darwin) DAV/1.0.3
    Still seeing the “mozilla.org” vs. iCal.app time zone discrepancy.

  28. Where oh where on the net is the information needed to back up one’s Sunbird .r data?
    Also, where oh where on the net is the information needed to copy Sunbird .5 data to a brand new calendar on another computer?
    Shouldn’t these features be built in to the thing? I mean, really, people want to do this all the time, but searching on the net for this information is ridiculous since I can’t find it in a commom Mozilla location on the web.
    But then, perhaps it’s only me. Not.