ThunderBird New Mail Icon/MozTrayBiff in OpenSUSE (10.3)

I got tired of the slow and feature-lacking KMail as an email client and decided to switch to Thunderbird.  While I found it a very nice client, it was lacking a system tray icon for notifying of new email.

So I searched the Mozilla addon’s site and found New Mail Icon for Thunderbird (also known as “MozTrayBiff”).  This seemed to be exactly what I needed.  However, after installing the XPI and then restarting Thunderbird I found that it did not work.  No system tray icon, even after enabling one to always be there, and no notification on the receipt of a new email.

I had a look around for a similar piece of software but could not find any.  I thought about switching my window manager from KDE to XFCE (where it is known to work) but I quite like KDE.  So I decided to recompile the XPI.

Once I had the relevant RPMS installed (such as MozillaThunderbird-devel), I managed to get it compiled, although I did have to modify a few paths to libraries and include files manually.

The end result was that it works.  The package can be downloaded from the link below.

New Mail Icon/MozTrayBiff - XPI of New Mail Icon compiled against OpenSUSE 10.3 with the latest KDE3 and Thunderbird 2 provided through OpenSUSE's download repository.