How to install Thunderbird in linux?

[Chris Jones]

> Another reason that's a good idea is security updates.  If you download
> and install private "off piste" binaries, it's down to you to track when
> security issues are found with them and go off and update them.  Whereas
> a periodic "yum update" will pull in security (and other) updates
> automatically.

It might be worth here pointing out for linux newbies that there is a 
real fundamental difference between linux and windows.

In the windows world, updates from Microsoft only cover OS updates, and 
perhaps office if you have it. nothing else.

In linux, things are very different. Your fedora installation will be 
already set up with various 'yum' repos. These are repositories which 
contain various 'rpm' packages which can be installed on your machine 
(rpm is just a format for packages - google for it if you want more 
info). These repos provide

1) Access to lots and lots of applications that where not installed by 
default.
2) updates to those packages.

Because linux is OSS, these repos can contain al sorts of packages. For 
instance firefox and thunderbird are in there. If you don't have them 
isntalled, just run (as root)

  > yum install firefox thunderbird

and thats it...

Also note that there are various GUI frontends to yum, which you can 
also use (yumex, pirut, kyum) to name a few. I suggest giving yumex a try

  > yum install yumex

Finally, the 'official' Fedora repos only provide packages which for 
legal reasons Fedora can provide. There are many others available in 
other 'third party' repos which provide more things. (like mp3 support 
etc.). Check out livna and atrpms for details, or ask here ;)

basically, these days I rarely find anything I need that I cannot get 
via yum. Anything you get by yum will benefit from automatic updates, 
whenever you run

  > yum update

or trigger an update from any of the various GUI frontends.

cheers Chris

> 
> Thunderbird, like Firefox, is a high profile target for security issues
> because a lot of the codebase is shared with the Windows versions, which
> are pretty popular.  One of the biggest benefits of specifically Fedora
> is that Redhat are very hot on getting security updates out quickly.
> 
> -Andy
>