20 March 2008 by Lars

Installing system-wide Thunderbird extensions

Most Thunderbird extensions are platform-agnostic. But some aren’t, and fail when run on the wrong system. In my case, I (NFS-)share a Thunderbird configuration between a x86 laptop and a x86_64 workstation. And my personally installed extensions are then always available. Some might not work on x86_64, but they don’t mess up the UI. This is different for Lightning. Forcing an install of the x86 version actually messes up the UI under x86_64. I did find a x86_64 compile of the extension, but of course, because I’m sharing extensions across the two systems, I could not install that in my personal directory.

This site finally explained it to me:

 
su - 
# /usr/bin/thunderbird -install-global-extension name-of-extension.xpi
# chmod -R a+rX /usr/lib*/thunderbird/