Here is how I found to share the Thunderbird Address Book and Lightning Calendar in a dual boot (Windows XP – Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10) machine. There is a mozillaZaine item that says you can simply change your config file to point to an address book location, but there seems to be a bug in TB for that.
The instructions below assume your have been running TB with Lightning on Windows and on Ubuntu so it's installed in both locations. As always, back up the files you will be working with before starting.
Please let me know if this helped and/or worked for you.
First, sharing the Address Book: (overview – using a symlink in Ubuntu to point to the TB Address Book in Windows)
On Ubuntu
1.Open a file browser and browse to the TB address book (abook.mab) in Windows. Typically this will be found under ~Documents and Settings/user/Application Data/Thunderbird/profiles/”number”.default
2.Right click on abook.mab and select “Make Link”. This will create a symlink in that directory to the address book.
3.Open another file browser window and browse to the TB address book location on Ubuntu. This is a hidden file so you may want to show hidden files by View>Show Hidden Files. Typically the TB address book on Ubuntu this will be found under Home/user/.mozilla-thunderbird/”number'.default
4.Re-name the abook.mab to abook.old
5.Drag the symlink from the first first browser window into this browser window's location.
6.Re-name the symlink to abook.mab
7.Open TB and click the address book, you should see your entries from your Windows instance.
Now, sharing the Lightning Calendar: (Overview – creating a new ics calendar that both TB instances can use).
UPDATE: you may want to use vijay's suggestion of a symlink (see below) for sharing the calendar vs. setting up an ICS calendar as outlined below. I have subsequently tried it and it works great and is much easier!!
Windows Portion
1.In TB on Windows make a new calendar File>New>Calendar and select the “On the Network” option. Note: you don't need to be on a “network” to do this. The calendar will be stored where you select, and this just sets it up so it can be shared. Next.
2.Select the “iCalendar (ICS)” selection
3.Fill in the location where the calendar will be stored. This needs to be a location both OS's can access. Use the format “File:///c:\directory\path\to\calendar-name.ics” without the quotes and note the ///. This will create the location and calendar. Next.
4.Give the new calendar a nick name. Next
5.Finish and you should have a new calendar in TB.
6.Select the new calendar, create a new event and save it. This ensures you can write to your new calendar without errors, i.e. it was created correctly
7.If you have been running TB in Windows for a while you may want to move your old calendar entries into your new calendar. Now's a good time to do that.
8.In TB Calendar view select Calendar>import>select old calendar (the one you will be copying from) as ICS file type.
9.A pop-up will ask which calendar to import to, select your new calendar.
10.Your old calendar entries will be copied to your new calendar.
Ubuntu Portion
1.Open a file browser window and browse to the new calendar location on the Windows drive/partition.
2.Open TB and go to calendar view and follow steps above starting with step 1.
3.When you get to step 3, the location again begins with “file:///” you can copy/paste the location from your file browser window you opened in step 1 and end with the calendar-name.ics
4.You should be able to skip step 4 and Finish (step 5).
5.You should now have a new calendar in TB. Select it and you should see the entries from the calendar in your Windows instance of TB.
6.Be sure to select this calendar in both instances (Windows and Ubuntu) to share entries back and forth.
Joy!!!
). However, I can't seem to find out how to get the address book from the XP side to show when I boot into the Linux side.
