Moving your Thunderbord profile data from Windows to Ubuntu

Moving your profile data

  • Install Firefox and Thunderbird in Linux.
  • If you have any extension (add-on) installed that has platform-specific components in the profile, such as the Lightning calender for Thunderbird, you have to uninstall it first in your Windows profile. Once you have moved it to Linux, you can then reinstall the Linux version of that extension (in the case of Lightning, all your calendar data should be retained).
  • Some extensions (such as IE Tab for Firefox) work only on Windows. It is recommended that you uninstall (or at least disable) any of them that is installed in your Windows profile before moving.
  • Find your existing Firefox profile and Thunderbird profile.
  • Copy the the contents of the Firefox profile over the profile in the ".mozilla/firefox" subdirectory in your home directory. Copy the contents of the Thunderbird profile over the profile in the ".thunderbird" subdirectory in your home directory. They are hidden subdirectories, you need to find an option in your file browser to display them. In both Gnome and KDE you can use "Show -> hidden files" to show directories that begin with a period. If you're dual-booting, many distributions provide read-only access to your NTFS partition in the file manager, you don't have to copy the profile to some type of removable media.
  • Your package manager typically adds a menu command to run Firefox and Thunderbird when it installs them. For Ubuntu, it's at Applications -> Internet.
If the application doesn't start, type locate run-mozilla.sh in a terminal. It should return the directories that have that file, which also contain either the "firefox" or "thunderbird" shell scripts used to start the application. Type echo $PATH into a terminal and verify the directory is on the path.
If it starts but doesn't work correctly, try running in safe mode to temporarily disable any added extensions. While they normally also work under Linux you occasionally run into Gnome or KDE integration problems, or it might not be using a relative pathname to store its data. Exiting the application and deleting the extensions.rdf file in the profile also solves many problems (it will be recreated when you run the application).
You could have also used one of the other methods described in moving your profile to tell Firefox and Thunderbird where to look for the profile. For example, you might want to create a "profiles" directory that contains both your Firefox and Thunderbird profiles.


Moving from Windows to Linux

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: the cloud platform of choice, due on 17th April 2014

Image
Canonical today announces Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will be released on 17th April 2014, bringing a new level of reliability, performance and interoperability to cloud and scale out environments with support and maintenance for five years. “Ubuntu is the primary platform for cloud – public, private or hybrid. In this release, our third LTS with deep roots in cloud, we raise the bar for efficiency and orchestration at scale. That’s why businesses are adopting Ubuntu as they move to the cloud computing era,” says Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical. Global enterprises including AT&T, Bharti, Bouygues Telecom, British Telecom, China Telecom, China Unicom, Cogent Communications, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, Korea Telecom, NEC, NTT, Numergy, Orange France, Time Warner Cable, Turk Telecom, Verizon and Yandex, as well as leading web scale services such as Netflix, Instagram, Hipchat and Quora are all building next generation services on Ubuntu. “Time Warner Cable (TWC) is running Ubun
Read more

New Pop!_OS Update Makes (Some) Computers Faster

Image
A small update rolling out to the Ubuntu-based   Pop!_OS   distro could make a big impact on system performance. Pop!_OS now enables  zram  support by default — and to  quote Sytem76  themselves the feature  “actively compresses memory in the background, increasing the amount of free memory your system has available. This results in increased FPS in games, or faster simulations and compiler runs.” Pretty nice, eh? Instead of moving infrequently used data to a separate swap partition on disk (which is slow), zram compresses data, and keeps it in RAM (which is faster). On systems with lower amounts of RAM available zram allows more available memory to be used for runnings apps and games. Though I’m yet to try it on Pop!_OS, zram is something I use on several devices as  Fedora enabled zram  a few years back. Though I don’t come bearing any graphs to back the enthusiasm up, it’s something I definitely  think  I feel the benefit of, even for basic computing needs. Still, it’s not just thos
Read more

Ubuntu’s New Installer is Shaping Up Nicely

Image
  Ubuntu’s been working on its   new OS installer   for a couple years, now it looks like the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 ‘Lunar Lobster’ release will finally ship it by default. The latest pending  Ubuntu 23.04 daily builds  use the reworked installer by default, and is expected to power the default install experience of the Ubuntu 23.03 beta in March. Thing is, despite the fact the installer is built using an entirely different toolkit ( Flutter ) and now leverages the Ubuntu’s  server-based  Subiquity  and  Curtin  efforts, it doesn’t look  that  different to the existing one. In fact, if no-one told you the installer was rebuilt you’d probably never tell. The new installer was available to test in previous versions of Ubuntu using a special ‘canary’ ISO, and is also  available as a Snap  app you can run (but shouldn’t) on an existing Ubuntu install. Now the Flutter-based front-end has filtered out in the official daily builds — so let’s go hands on to see how it performs! Ubuntu’s New In
Read more