How to dock Thunderbird to the System Tray in Linux
Mon, Mar 2, 2009
While most applications in Linux work nicely with docking, such as Pidgin, Mozilla’s Thunderbird mail client is a notable exception. And for those who rely upon email to get through the day, this can be an incredibly annoying inconvenience. This howto will explain how to get Thunderbird to close to your system tray in Gnome, KDE, and XFCE.
Using the AllTray utility, any application in Linux can be configured to close to the system tray. It’s incredibly simple to do, and only takes a few steps:
1. Install Alltray. For debian-based systems, such as Ubuntu, it can be installed by running:
2. Setup your Thunderbird shortcut to use Alltray. In Ubuntu, you can modify your menu by accessing System — Preferences — Main Menu.
3. Double click on Mozilla Thunderbird Mail/News to edit the menu item.
4. Change the command to “alltray -s -l thunderbird %u” as shown below, and click close.
Now thunderbird will close to your system tray, instead of remaining in an open window all day long. That’s it!
Like this post?
- Subscribe to the RSS feed to get more like it!
- Share it:
- Leave a comment!
No related posts.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
Follow on Facebook
Loading ...
Thank you. This was very helpful.
Great, it works!
Have ditched Kmail for Thunderbird, you’ve saved a great annoyance for me!
Many thanks!
In KDE, kdocker works perfectly, and is more “native” than alltray…
Wow! Finally got it! I tried to get it working with Alltray itself, but didn’t worked… now it’s great!
Thanks a lot!
thanks man, nice post
Thx, works very well
Works perfect on LinuxMint KDE 4.2.4
Thanks!
got it, right now I have tb in tray but whats difference when it is still exist in window list panel!? and when i close it.. it will remove from tray, too!?!?
perfect!!! problem solved by restarting…
Try FireTray it works great for me i’m running Fedora 12, with kde 4, after you install it just change the settings to what you want, like minimize on close…
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4868
get the dev version if your running 3.0+
http://code.google.com/p/firetray/