Lightning 0.9 Release Notes

These Release Notes cover what's new, download and installation instructions and known issues for Lightning 0.9 Please read these notes and the bug filing instructions before reporting any bugs to Bugzilla.

What's New in Lightning 0.9

Lightning 0.9 is the latest release of our calendar extension for Mozilla Thunderbird®. We recommend that all users upgrade to this latest version.

The following features have been added to Lightning 0.9:

Events spanning days now have a visual indicator indicating them as connected events
When reloading a remote calendar a progress indicator is now shown
The so-called "minimonth" (small calendar month in the upper left) has been given a visual overhaul
The calendar views (day, week, multiweek, month) have been given a visual overhaul
The today pane can now be displayed in calendar mode and task mode as well
CalDAV support and interoperability with various CalDAV servers has been improved
iMip/iTip support (support for email invitations) has been greatly improved
The application stability and memory consumption has been greatly improved
Lightning 0.9 is intended to be the last release for the Thunderbird 2 series. For the future we are planning to integrate Lightning fully into the upcoming Thunderbird 3 release
A full list of changes that have gone into this release can be found on The Rumbling Edge website

Release Date: September 23, 2008

Downloading and Installing

Before installing, make sure your computer meets the system requirements. Mozilla.org provides Lightning for Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X in a variety of languages. Windows users must have Windows XP or later.

IMPORTANT: Install the updated timezones for Windows XP or later. Information on obtaining the updated timezones can be found in Microsoft Knowledge Base article 951072.
Not updating your Windows timezones will result in unreliable and erroneous display and entry of time data! Be sure to do this!

Windows releases prior to Windows XP are working but may display event times erroneously due to outdated timezones on the operating system level. This can be fixed using unofficial patches. Users should read the known issues section for more information.

To get Lightning 0.9, 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 for Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.0.x

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.

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
In Mozilla Thunderbird, under the "Tools" menu, open the "Add-ons Manager"
Click the "Install" button, locate and select the .XPI file you downloaded in step 1, and click "OK"
Restart Mozilla Thunderbird

Known Issues

This list covers the major known issues with Lightning 0.9. Please read this list before reporting any new bugs.

All Systems

Lightning 0.9 will attempt to guess your timezone on startup. As this is only a best guess, you must manually set the timezone in the Thunderbird Preferences/Options dialog before entering data. Not doing so may cause events to appear at the wrong time
The experimental support for viewing remote calendars offline has various known issues in the area of performance and calendar data display. It does not support the offline editing of events and tasks
It is impossible to load several calendars with different passwords on the same server. (bug 247486)
"By weekday" and "by day" recurrence types (such as "recur on the last weekday of the month") are not supported. (bug 322458)
Concurrent editing of remote calendars by multiple users can lose data. (bug 329570)
There are intermittent issues when modifying occurrences of recurring events via iMIP and Copy/Paste. (bug 354578)
Under some instances the "Do you want to save your changes" dialog does not come up when editing events in the event dialog. (bug 364387)
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)
Events deleted in Lightning will not be deleted on a OpenXchange server unless "enabledelete=yes" is added as a GET parameter. (bug 369076)
Multiple windows of the same single event can be opened from the Agenda, the task list and the unifinder. (bug 373251)
E-Mail invites sent out by Lightning in Outlook 2000/2002/XP compatibility mode, will only be shown by Outlook 2000 if the Service Pack 3 (SP3) has been installed. (bug 377761)
You may experience Thunderbird application hangs when using remote ICS or CalDAV calendars with secure HTTP (https://) in connection with secure IMAP/SMTP (SSL) email accounts (bug 390036)
Lightning 0.9 will only display the email invite messages from other parties, if "View -> Display Attachments inline" is set in Thunderbird. (bug 403768)
Adding events or tasks to a CalDAV calendar whose display has been turned off, will not re-enable the display of that calendar. (bug 421986)
Lightning cannot send out task invitations and you cannot accept or decline task invitations from within your e-mail inbox. (bug 445982)
There are interoperability issues with versions of the DAViCal (RSCDS) CalDAV server prior to release 0.9.5. People using earlier releases of DAViCal are advised to stay with Lightning 0.8 until they can upgrade their DAViCal installation to the current version. (bug 448453)

Windows

Printing a calendar does not work on the first attempt, but will work on the following attempts. (bug 351581)
Due to the lack of official timezone updates from Microsoft for the following Windows releases
- Windows 98
- Windows 98 SE
- Windows ME
- Windows NT 4.0
- Windows 2000
you may experience that events will be shown off by an hour.
There are unofficial patches available for Windows 98/98 SE/ME and for Windows NT 4.0/2000.
Note: These patches are not provided by the Mozilla Calendar Project and the developers can not guarantee that these patches will work as intended and do not have unintended side-effects.

Localizations

Thanks to the hard work of our localization teams, Lightning 0.9 ships with the following locales pre-installed:

Basque - Euskara
Catalan - Català
Chinese (Simplified) - 中文 (简体)
Chinese (Traditional) - 正體中文 (繁體)
Czech - Čeština
Danish - Dansk
Dutch - Nederlands
English (United States)
French - Français
Georgian - ქართული
German - Deutsch
Hungarian - Magyar
Irish - Gaeilge
Icelandic - íslenska
Italian - Italiano
Japanese - 日本語
Korean - 한국어
Lithuanian - lietuvių
Norwegian (Bokmål) - Norsk bokmål
Norwegian (Nynorsk) - Norsk nynorsk
Polish - Polski
Portuguese (Brazilian) - Português (do Brasil)
Portuguese (Portugal) - Português (Europeu)
Romanian - română
Russian - Русский
Slovak - Slovenský
Slovenian - Slovensko
Spanish (Latin America) - Español (de América)
Spanish (Spain) - Español (de España)
Swedish - Svenska
Ukrainian - Українська мова

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.