Dual Boot Your Firefox and Thunderbird on Ubuntu 7.10 Guty Gibbon

I recently mentioned on the Fresh Ubuntu podcast how I liked the write support for NTFS partitions that comes pre-installed and how the first thing I did with it was to use it to maintain a common set of profiles for Firefox and Thunderbird between my Windows XP and Gutsy installations. Basically, what this means is that I now have to configure new email accounts, extensions/add-ons, etc., one time. When I boot into the other OS, I get the same exact configuration.
For example, I currently have 9 tabs open in Firefox. If I were to boot into Windows right now, without syncing profiles, I would not see the same setup. I would have to email email myself the links, or share them to some other location (a network drive, USB flash drive, or shared FAT32 *shudder* partition). However, now that Ubuntu can read and write NTFS, that’s a thing of the past.
Previously, I blogged about how I copied my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles from a Windows machine to a Mac. The same procedure works in Linux. However, this takes it to the next level by keeping the same profile in sync between the two. The previous post only made a copy, which would then change on each computer when you used them.
Here’s what I did.

1. Locate the Firefox profile on the Windows partition. On my installation, my Windows XP partition is first. Unless you do something weird and move your profiles, they are usually located in C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[profileid] , where username is your username (e.g. peter) and profileid is the randomly-generated profile identifier from Firefox (e.g. f39ojr4y.default). On my Ubuntu installation, this same directory is available at
   /media/sda1/Documents and Settings/peter/Application \
   Data/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/f39ojr4y.default
2. Locate the Thunderbird profile. Mine is at C:\Documents and Settings\peter\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\wajy8lnr.default. Again, substitute in your own username and profile id here. In Ubuntu, I see this directory as/media/sda1/Documents and Settings/peter/Application \
   Data/Thunderbird/Profiles/wajy8lnr.default/
3. Fire up Firefox and Thunderbird in Ubuntu, then close them down. You must have used Firefox and Thunderbird at least once in Ubuntu before doing this next step, or you won’t have locations for your default profiles.
4. Locate your Firefox and Thunderbird profiles in Ubuntu. These are in /home/peter/.mozilla and /home/peter/.mozilla-thunderbird (again, substituting peter for your username on Ubuntu). Under each of these directories you will see two other unique profile ids (e.g. vkuuxfit.default and 05zsr2ut.default). Note that there is no correlation between the profile names on Windows or Linux.
5. Back up your current profiles, just in case.cd ~/.mozilla/firefox ; mv vkuuxfit.default vkuuxfit.default.orig
   cd ~/.mozilla-thunderbird ; mv 05zsr2ut.default 05zsr2ut.default.orig
   Note that you must replace my profile names show above with the profile you see listed there. If you try copying and pasting exactly what I have above, it almost certainly will fail.
6. Symbolically link a new Firefox and Thunderbird profile to your existing Windows profiles:ln -s /media/sda1/Documents and Settings/peter/Application\
   Data/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/f39ojr4y.default \
   ~/.mozilla/firefox/vkuuxfit.default
   ln -s /media/sda1/Documents and Settings/peter/Application \
   Data/Thunderbird/Profiles/wajy8lnr.default \
   ~/.mozilla-thunderbird/05zsr2ut.default
   
   Note that you must again substitute your Windows and Linux profile names where I use mine or it will not work. I colored the Windows profiles in blue and the Ubuntu profiles in brown so you can identify the target and the source more easily.
7. Now, fire up Firefox and Thunderbird, and you should see exactly the same configurations as you have on Windows.