Tomorrow (2009-05-14) is Thunderbird and SeaMonkey TestDay again and this time the focus is on Linux. So if you are a Thunderbird or SeaMonkey user or want to become one this is where you should join in to get those really stable and usable.
To support that event and our openSUSE users there are new current snapshots of TB and SM in the mozilla:beta buildservice repository.
And let me cite the following from their testday page: “… and the fact that it’s openSUSE’s community week we would like to focus this week’s bugday to bugs that are happening on Linux.”

A few days ago Mozilla Labs announced the release of Prism 1.0 Beta.

I always was following from the side how it evolved but never tried it myself up to now. As it moves slowly out of the labs status I started to package it for openSUSE and so it is available now through the openSUSE Build Service’s “well-known” mozilla:beta repository as prism and prism-refractor which is the Firefox addon helping you to create webapps even easier.

So start to play around with it and … have a lot of fun!

Firefox 3.5b4 which is available in mozilla:beta since its upstream release finally hit openSUSE’s Factory today.

Give it a try and check out the new features!

I’ve released a Thunderbird 3.0b2 test package in mozilla:beta today. This is the initial package for openSUSE and may (actually does) have some issues but it still should be usable basically. Feel free to report packaging issues to Novell’s bugzilla. (Please ignore the outdated extension warning at startup.)

For deeper testing the application I recommend in general to join the upstream QA effort and especially today’s Test Day. The Thunderbird community is aware of these openSUSE packages so if you like you can do the testing using these while you always should mention their origin in upstream reports (since there might be also packaging issues).

Update:
There are some things I missed to mention earlier:

• MozillaThunderbird3 can be installed in parallel to MozillaThunderbird to make it easier testing the package.
• Thunderbird 3 saves its profile to .thunderbird3 instead of .thunderbird (which is different from upstream) to avoid breakage of the TB2 profile.

Someone asked me for a package for SeaMonkey 2 which is currently under development. So here it is in mozilla:beta with most likely some rough edges. It’s an early preview package and not meant for production use but if someone wants to give me some feedback feel free.
It’s currently not possible to install it side by side with SeaMonkey 1.1 but I’ll probably make that possible in the near future.

Yesterday I took the time to update to Firefox 3.1b2 (upstream release announcement) in mozilla:beta and fixed the outstanding build issues (gcc complaints) for 11.1 and Factory. What is still missing are the translations so it’s only available in en-US for now. Not every feature from openSUSE’s Firefox 3.0 package has been ported to 3.1 yet (namely gconf/lockdown integration) but it’s rather complete besides of the two things above.

As with the release of openSUSE 11.1rc1 I’ve enabled openSUSE_11.1 for the mozilla repository. So feel free to add it to your local repositories.

Another news is that I’ve added the package MozillaThunderbird-lightning which contains Mozilla’s calendar extension for Thunderbird. I’ve planned this years ago but for different reasons (including gcc bugs that didn’t happen until Duncan asked me to add his Lightning package to the mozilla repo just yesterday). The reason for adding that extension was simply that you can’t get it as x86-64 version from upstream.

And as of today openSUSE 10.2 was removed from the buildservice which means that there are no more mozilla updates for that platform. I’m wondering how many people out there still rely on those since it’s possible to reenable support for that again but I’ll only consider that if there is real demand for it. So let me know and speak up 😉

Since a few hours it’s possible to install Shiretoko Alpha 1+ from the openSUSE Buildservice.
Warning:
These packages are just provided for testing and are nothing for the faint heart!
They are designed to be installed in parallel to other Firefox installations but it will use the same profile as your other versions if you don’t take care.
You should create an alternative profile by executing firefox31 -no-remote -p and remember using the correct one later using the parameter -P. (And create a backup of ~/.mozilla/firefox!).
I’m planning to do occasional updates but at least will try to follow the upstream milestones.

One-click install

Firefox 3 has been finally released today from the Mozilla Corporation!
That also means that adopted RPM packages are provided for the openSUSE users through the mozilla buildservice repository.
Subscribers of that repository will get the final Firefox 3 package when running a package update on distributions where it is actually supported. (openSUSE 10.2 and above).
Firefox 2.x is and will still be available for older distributions in that repo.
In addition a new RPM package called firefox2 is now available in the mozilla:legacy repository for people who want to have Firefox 2.x explicitely. We’ll keep that maintained as long as possible.
Preparing the full official online update for openSUSE 11.0 is on its way as well.

Since I saw some comments/requests during openSUSE 11.0’s beta phase that Firefox is still at 3.0b5 level even as Firefox 3.0rc1 is already out I want to give a short comment on what the plans are.
In openSUSE’s roadmap there was a freeze for packages containing cryptographic algorithms at April 7th. At that point Firefox 3.0b5 was current and so it’s not allowed to make cryptographic changes after that date. As Firefox depends heavily on Mozilla’s NSS which holds these algorithms we have to keep them in sync to be sure everything works.
When openSUSE 11.0 gets finally released there will be an online update to the latest Firefox package.
If you want to test what actually will end up in that package you can subscribe to the buildservice repository mozilla:beta and get the latest package there.
You are welcome to report issues with that in Novell bugzilla’s Firefox component mentioning that you use the buildservice package.