Because I had messed up my Kbuntu installation I had to reinstall using the latest version.
Its always fun to setup a “new” PC but as usually I had forgot a lot of the problems and one of them was Thunderbird.

I have a Raspberry Pi as dns, dhcp and ldap server and everything works fine.
So I had the new PC using LDAP as authorization and everything was working fine.

Next was to install Thunderbird and it running fine except when I tried to add a new email account then Thunderbird crashed with a segment fault.

I tried all kinds of hacks to get is working but nothing helped. So what I should have done from the start was to install the Thunderbird debug symbols and debug the crash.

It showed a problem with LDAP and then fail code from the debugging session got me to a very old bug (2006) with Thunderbird and LDAP which is still not fixed.

The workaround is to install nscd (Embedded GNU C Library: Name Service Cache Daemon).

$>sudo apt-get install nscd

After the service was installed and running Thunderbird could add email accounts 🙂