Sharing profiles between Linux and Windows

When you dual-boot between Linux and Windows it can be helpful to share your profiles between the two operating systems. This saves gives you synchronized bookmarks and saves you the hassles to configure your mail accounts on both ends.

You need to have a partition that is readable by both OS. This probably means that it's formatted as VFAT as this is the only filesystem that can readily be read/written by almost any system.

I'll only describe the procedure for Firefox; it's equivalent for Thunderbird. I also assume that your exisiting profile is on Linux.

On the shared partition create a directory to hold your profiles:
$ mkdir /mnt/winxp/Profiles

Open ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini in the editor of your choice. Change the line that says path=default.x5q (this will likely be different on your system) to point to the shared partition e.g. /mnt/winxp/Profiles/Firefox. Also change the line IsRelative=1 to IsRelative=0. This tells Firefox where the profile is located and that the value in path is an absolute path.

Finally move (or copy) your existing profile to this directory:
$ mv ~/.mozilla/firefox/default.x5q /mnt/winxp/Profiles/Firefox

Caveat It can happen that a crash on the (say) Windows side leaves behind a lockfile that prevents Firefox on Linux from starting. This is somewhat of a nuisance and can easily be solved by removing the lockfile. You could also setup a script to automatically remove any lockfiles once you log-in.

mailto: from Firefox and http: from Thunderbird

When running Firefox and clicking on a mailto: link you obviously want to send an e-mail, probably through Thunderbird. Unfortunately this doesn't happen automatically on Gentoo Linux (and probably on other distros as well that don't deal with this).

Here's what you have to do: you need two small shell scripts that invoke Firefox or Thunderbird respectively. You can find them at the end of this section. Download them to a suitable location e.g. $HOME/bin

You then need to activate the external handlers for Firefox and Thunderbird.

Firefox

Enter about:config in the location bar and filter for mailto. Set the value of network.protocol-handler.app.mailto to the location of the hander-mailto.sh script. Also make sure that network.protocol-handler.external.mailto is set to true.

Thunderbird

For Thunderbird you have to do the same but you have to edit $HOME/.thunderbird/*/prefs.js directly. Set network.protocol-handler.http and network.protocol-handler.https to the location of the handler-http.sh script.

That's it.

• handler for http/https
• handler for mailto

Mac OS X Thunderbird attachment handling

For a while I've had trouble opening binhex encoded files (jpeg in my case) send from an Entourage client (Microsoft-Entourage/11.3.6.070618) in Thunderbird (2.0.0.16 at the time of this writing). What would happen is that TB starts Preview and it would complain that it can't open the file because it doesn't recognize the file format.

The attachment looks like this:

--B_3302117323_352569
Content-type: application/mac-binhex40; name="anian_72.jpg"
Content-disposition: attachment;
	filename="anian_72.jpg"

(This file must be converted with BinHex 4.0)
:$'&ZD@&ZAcFb,QT`C`"+8%9(1%**633!N!2!43!!jda(IrrBrq!!%%T'58B!!3)
"!%J!5!!!rq%B689iD@B!!%e0!#S!N!-)!!S"$`!#!*!$%J#3!iB"%!!#!*!$#J#

So, the MIME-type is application/mac-binhex40 but the extension is .jpg. Apparently ThunderBird prefers the extension over the MIME-type (or ignores the MIME-type completely).

My way around the problem is to save the files and rename them to .hqx. Opening them then decompresses them and Preview is able to open the resulting jpeg file.