How To Install birdtray on Ubuntu 20.04

In this tutorial we learn how to install birdtray on Ubuntu 20.04. birdtray is system tray notifications for Thunderbird

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install birdtray on Ubuntu 20.04.

What is birdtray

birdtray is:

Birdtray provides systray notifications for Thunderbird. It displays the count of unread mail, hides the Thunderbird window when not in use, and restores it on clicking the tray icon. It also provides a context menu with commands such as starting composing a new mail.

It is a nasty hack – an external process looking at Thunderbird’s insides, it suffers from problems like noticing new mails only after a delay, having to restart Thunderbird just to hide its window, etc – you’d want to use an extension like firetray instead – but, it is likely that support for Thunderbird XUL extensions will be dropped soon, possibly by the time you read these words.

There are three methods to install birdtray on Ubuntu 20.04. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install birdtray Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install birdtray using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install birdtray

Install birdtray Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install birdtray using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install birdtray

Install birdtray Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Ubuntu. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install birdtray using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install birdtray

How To Uninstall birdtray on Ubuntu 20.04

To uninstall only the birdtray package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove birdtray

Uninstall birdtray And Its Dependencies

To uninstall birdtray and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Ubuntu 20.04, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove birdtray

Remove birdtray Configurations and Data

To remove birdtray configuration and data from Ubuntu 20.04 we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge birdtray

Remove birdtray configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove birdtray configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge birdtray

References

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install birdtray package on Ubuntu 20.04 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.