How To Install Thunderbird 2 on Fedora; Fedora Development Respository Broken for Fedora Core 6

I tried installing Thunderbird 2 from Fedora Core 6 Development Respository, the file actually belongs to currently in development Fedora 10. Yum / Yumex required that nss package be updated too in order to update Thunderbird. The update went through fine but the software couldn’t be run because of initialization error in libgfx_gtk.so and I couldn’t find any help on the net either.

When I uninstalled Thunderbird 3 and then re-installed Thunderbird 1.5, the security capability was broken. I couldn’t connect using SSL to mail servers. Also Internet Messenger (pidgin) was broken. This was as a result of nss package being updated along with Thunderbird 2. I removed the latest nss package and that fixed Thunderbird 2.

To install Thunderbird 2, I downloaded the tar.gz archive from mozilla site. I unpacked it under /usr/lib as is the format adopted by Fedora team. Then I replaced the thunderbird script in /usr/bin with a symbolic link pointing to the thunderbird 2 executable.