Thunderbird preferences

[Peter N. Spotts]

On Fri, 2006-06-09 at 10:43 -0400, frank mccormick wrote:
> I am thinking of switching to Thunderbird and wonder where in T'bird is 
> the user preference for a browser set. When I click on a URL in a 
> message, nothing happens. Starting T'bird from a shell I get the error 
> message " no running window found" but no indication of what browser 
> it's looking for.
> 
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Frank
> 

Frank,

Use gnome-default-applications-properties to ensure thunderbird is set
as your default email client and whatever your browser is for browser
(firefox?) It looks like TB assumes you already have your browser
activated. So make sure your browser is running before you try to
activate a link in an email. Assuming you use firefox, an alternative is
to use the following script (copy it into a text file and make it
executable) and use it as your "browser" in the
gnome-default-applications... settings.

#!/bin/sh
# firefox-open.sh
if firefox -remote 'ping()' 2> /dev/null ; then
        exec firefox -remote "openurl($1, new-tab)"
else
        exec firefox "$1"
fi

When you name the file, give it a .sh at the end, then do chmod a+rwx
filename.sh

In theory, anyway, this should activate firefox whether it's already
running or not.

Hope this helps...

Pete
-- 
Peter N. Spotts | Science reporter
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