I've been using Mozilla Thunderbird as my mail client for some time now and for the most part enjoying it. The only real problem I've had is that it won't launch for a regular user -- it only works as root.
I'm using version 0.3 (the latest gentoo gives me, just barely upgraded from 0.2 yesterday hoping it would fix it, but it didn't). I type 'MozillaThunderbird' at the prompt to launch the application, and 'which MozillaThunderbird' gives me /usr/bin/MozillaThunderbird either as myself or as root. Am I launching Thunderbird the wrong way, or might something else be wrong with my system? When I try to launch it as non-root there are no error messages, no core, nuthin'.
Ok, I solved it, and will put the answer here for posterity sake (and so you all can stop racking your brains).
I guess I should have paid more attention to Greg's comment about ~/.thunderbird/. I imagined that since I'd never successfully run Thunderbird as non-root, I wouldn't have to worry about a bad ~/.thunderbird/ directory. But when I broke through my mental block and checked anyways, *behold!*, there /was/ a .thunderbird directory in my home directory, and it was owned by /root/. Change the ownership on that directory and Thunderbird launches right up.
My suspicion is that the first time I ran thunderbird was as root, right after the initial emerge, having neglected to log out of root. But it must have been a loose root shell with my regular user environment still intact (eg. 'sudo su' instead of 'sudo su -'). So the .thunderbird directory was created in /my/ home directory, but with root onwership.
All in all though, it still would've been nice if Thunderbird had died with a nice error message telling me what was wrong. I'll have to throw together a patch.
Thanks for the help, all,
Jacob Fugal
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