john crisostomo’s blog

This How-To is Acer modded Linpus Lite specific, please don't try this on an Acer Aspire One that has Microsoft Windows XP or Vista installed.

This How-To will guide you in installing Mozilla Thunderbird and Pidgin Messenger in your Aspire One and change the icon on your desktop to the original icon. This will only work assuming that you are still using AME or the Acer e-mail client that came pre-installed with your Aspire One and the Acer Messenger as well.

First thing that we need to do is to uninstall AME, by typing this command in the Terminal [alt+f2 and then type Terminal and then click on Run]:

When the terminal is finally done performing those task, we can go ahead and install Pidgin and Thunderbird using pirut or in my case the Smart Package Manager [assuming the you have already signed keys using this command: sudo yum update fedora-release]. Open pirut or Smart and then search for Pidgin and then Thunderbird. After we're done with that, we're going to associate both programs with the default Mail and Messenger icon by typing these commands on the Terminal:

Well actually, it is as easy as that and we are done. You should now be able to use Mozilla Thunderbird and Pidgin using the default icons, but in case you are unhappy with those icons and wants to have the original icons, don't worry because we can do that by going to the Terminal and then typing:

It should open a notepad that has a lot of text written on it and just in case you want to label the icon differently, let's say change it from E-mail to Thunderbird, just replace the text after Name= and GenericName= to your preferred name. Let's get back to the icon. When we scroll down, we should be able to see a line that says Icon= , just replace it with thunderbird.png, save it and we're done. Well, sad to say for Pidgin it has to be done in a different way and I'll just cover that on my next post, because it involves tweaking of group-app.xml, and a single mistake can ruin your desktop.

If you're already satisfied, then that's all, however for additional info, you can read below.

So now we have Mozilla Thunderbird and its original icon, what to do next? Well this is not that necessary but just in case you found out, the Mozilla Thunderbird we just installed does not update itself automatically and if we check on the Help menu, Check for Updates is grayed out, that is due to the fact that this version of Thunderbird is from the Fedora 8 [the Linux distribution where Linpus is based] repository. So in order for us to fix this, we need to do these steps in the Terminal so that we will be getting the official release from Mozilla and we're going to install it in the /opt directory. This is how:

And then a lot of unpacking happens. After it's done we can type this again in the Terminal:

And we just need to change the Exec= line to look just like this:

That's pretty much it. But if you're bothered to have 2 Mozilla Thunderbirds installed in your Aspire One, we can delete the old one via pirut or Smart but it will delete the icon as well which can be remedied easily by searching Google these keywords that I have used which is 'thunderbird.png 64x64'. Just copy the image to your Downloads folder and then move it to the pixmaps directory using this command:

After that, we're done. Have fun!