Building Enigmail for SeaMonkey in Ubuntu 8.10

Submitted by andyr on Sun, 11/27/2011 - 10:11

I like SeaMonkey - I've used it for years (since the days of Netscape Communicator), but I also like using GnuPG signing and encryption of my mail. There's no enigmail package for Ubuntu 8.10 so I had to go and roll my own.

Here's the procedure I followed to build my own Enigmail package for Ubuntu :

  • Make a directory under which you're going to build your packages. I have a src directory under which I build all my software, so I'll start by making a directory under that for SeaMonkey.
    • #cd ~/src
    • #mkdir seamonkey
    • #cd seamonkey
  • Get all the packages required to build SeaMonkey
    • #sudo aptitude build-dep seamonkey
  • Now we need to get the Ubuntu source package
    • #apt-get source seamonkey
    • Build SeaMonkey and the packager for extensions
      • #dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -b
      • #make -C xpinstall/packager
    • Download the source for enigmail to a temporary directory, I have a tmp directory which I use for this purpose.
    • Copy the enigmail source into the SeaMonkey source tree (I'll assume that the SeaMonkey source unpacked into seamonkey-1.1.15+nobinonly)
      • #mv enigmail ~/src/seamonkey/seamonkey-1.1.15+nobinonly/mailnews/extensions
      • #cd ~/src/seamonkey/seamonkey-1.1.15+nobinonly/mailnews/extensions/enigmail
    • The makemake script which generates the makefiles for enigmail relies on the name of the directory at the top of the source tree being mozilla, this is wrong in our case. You can download a new makemake script to remedy this
    • Now we can build enigmail
      • #./makemake -t seamonkey-1.1.15+nobinonly -r
      • #make
      • #make xpi
    • Done, you'll find the enigmail xpi in ~/src/seamonkey/seamonkey-1.1.15+nobinonly/dist/bin/enigmail-0.95.7-linux-i686.xpi

    Hope this helps, if you want you can download enigmail from me.