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[Ryan Wagner]

That's pretty cool, I didn't realize you could share the profile between Windows and Linux, but it makes sense now. I also didn't know that you had a blog, and it looks like I'm going to be posting about a few things you wrote there (like the Thunderbird profile thing) and of course give you credit.

[El Guru (Al)]

I might look into this.  I'm getting to the point where I can do most everything in Ubuntu (well up until the Kernel upgrade) so there is not much reason to go into WinXP now.

[Pieter]

I also didn't know that you had a blog.

I don't update that blog anymore actually.

[Ryan Wagner]

I just came across these instructions on installing Nvu in Ubuntu 7.04, in case you still wanted to:
http://www.howtoforge.com/the_perfect_desktop_ubuntu7.04_p8

[El Guru (Al)]

I just came across these instructions on installing Nvu in Ubuntu 7.04, in case you still wanted to:
http://www.howtoforge.com/the_perfect_desktop_ubuntu7.04_p8

Thanks but Kompzer works fine for me.

[El Guru (Al)]

If you're willing to go the extra mile, you could even use the same profile on Windows and Linux at the same time. If you're interested: I wrote about it on my blog way back in January.

Was doing fine until I got to step 6 then I became very confused.  I am suppose to change everything that starts with 'C:\\Documents and Settings\\Allan\\Application Data\\' to something like 'Win XP/media/Documents and Settings/Allan/Application Data/'?

Note: Win XP is what my C: drive comes up as.

[Pieter]

First of all, an update. The article says that you have to run Thunderbird as a root to pull this trick. It appears that you don't have to do that anymore, as normal users can now read/write to Windows partitions once they're mounted by the root user. This means that you'll have to copy your Thunderbird profile directory, in your case C:\Documents and Settings\Allan\Application Data\Thunderbird, to /home/yourusername. Then rename the folder you just copied to your home directory to .mozilla-thunderbird. If Nautilus says that .mozilla-thunderbird is in use, go to View, click Show hidden files and delete .mozilla-thunderbird, assuming that you don't want to back up your old Linux Thunderbird profile.

OK. At this point, we're going to edit the prefs.js file you just copied to your Linux profile folder, which should be located in /home/something/.mozilla-thunderbird/Profiles/something.default. You'll have to change some paths in prefs.js so that Linux can find your Windows profile files. First mount the Windows drive where your Thunderbird profile is stored on. Open it in Nautilus. Browse to Documents and Settings > Allan > Application Data > Thunderbird. Then press CTRL+L. You'll see something like this on your screen:



The path in the "Location:" field, in my case /media/WINDOWS XP/Documents and Settings/Pieter De Decker/Application Data/Thunderbird, is the path to your Windows profile folder. Let's open the prefs.js file you copied to your Linux profile folder and start replacing the Windows paths with Linux paths. Again, don't edit your Windows prefs.js, edit prefs.js in /home/username/.mozilla-thunderbird/Profiles/something.default. For example, this:

user_pref("mail.root.none", "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Pieter De Decker\\Application Data\\Thunderbird\\Profiles\\vxq5t6mi.default\\Mail");

will change into something like this:

user_pref("mail.root.none", "/media/WINDOWS XP/Documents and Settings/Pieter De Decker/Application Data/Thunderbird/Profiles/vxq5t6mi.default/Mail");

Do this for every Windows path in prefs.js. As I said on my blog, you can remove the lines that contain [ProfD] as they will need to be regenerated by Thunderbird. You might want to change some things such as your default download folder from

user_pref("browser.download.dir", "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Pieter De Decker\\Bureaublad");

to something like:

user_pref("browser.download.dir", "/home/pdedecker/Desktop/");

so that all your attachments will be saved to your Linux desktop by default. And when you're on Windows, they will be stored on your Windows desktop by default. Neat! When you're done editing the file, save it. There is one more thing you have to do to make all this work. Open /home/username/.mozilla-thunderbird/profiles.ini in your favorite editor. Replace this line:

Path=C:\Documents and Settings\Pieter De Decker\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\vxq5t6mi.default

with something like this:

Path=/home/pdedecker/.mozilla-thunderbird/Profiles/vxq5t6mi.default

Finally, the moment we've all been waiting for: save the file, cross your fingers and start Thunderbird.

Please note that you'll always have to mount the Windows partition where your Thunderbird profile is stored on before you start Thunderbird. I know that you can auto-mount it, but that would require me to do some additional research. Alternatively, you can put your Thunderbird profile on your Linux partition and point Thunderbird on Windows to the profile folder on your Linux hard drive, but that's another story.

[El Guru (Al)]

Okay, I'll try that later. All my drives are automagically mounted when I start.

[Pieter]

So that shouldn't be a problem then. All this Thunderbird talk made me realize that I liked TB better than Evolution, so I switched back to the TB shared profile while I was writing the mini-tutorial. As you can see here, it works just as if you were only using Thunderbird on Linux. All your extensions, settings, color marks, folders etcetera can be used/accessed/changed on both platforms. Gotta love that open-source cross-platform compatibility.