It is no secret, it is easy to share a firefox profile. I am running a dual boot Linux / Windows and was therefore interested to share my Firefox profile between the two. But in the process, I actually became interested to be able to access that profile from my work computer. After all, there are already extensions to store bookmarks remotely so why not do the same with the complete profile.
This is the reason why I decided to create a new profile on my Dropbox. That way, the profile is stored remotely and synchronized in real-time between my work computer and my personal computer (both Linux and Windows).
Creating a new profile can be done in two ways. The first is by using the graphical interface and the second is by modifying the profiles.ini file directly. I will present both.
Add a profile with UI
To access the profile manager,
Under Linux: Open a console and type “firefox -profilemanager” (without the “”)
Under Windows: Open a command line (Windows+R), navigate to the firefox folder (cd C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox), and type “firefox -profilemanager”
This will open the profile manager window that should look like the following. In here, simply click the “Create Profile…” button.
The new windows allows to specify the folder where you want to store the profile.
Once the new profile is created, next time firefox start, the profile manager will pop-up and ask the profile that you want to use.
Note that if you want to completely replace your current profil with the “Dropbox” profile, you can simply copy and paste the content of the old default folder to the new “Dropbox” folder and then delete the default profile from the profile manager.
Modify directly the profiles.ini file
As an alternative to the UI method presented above, you can modify directly Firefox initialization file. To do so, you need to locate the file called profiles.ini. The path to the file is as follow:
Under Linux: /home/USERNAME/.mozilla/firefox/
Under windows: C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\
Open the file with your favorite text editor, and simply add a profile. After the addition of my dropbox profile, the file looks like the following:
The StartWithLastProfile indicates whether or not Firefox should ask you at start-up which profile to use or if it should load the previous profile that was in use. The first profile is my default profile and the second profile is the Dropbox profile. To switch to the whole dropbox solution, you just need to remove the default profile.
It is of course possible to move the content of your previous default profile to the new dropbox profile so that all previous information are copied.
A word about security
As anything that is stored on the cloud, be careful about what you put out there. By default, if you have allowed your password to be stored by Firefox without any master password, they are stored in clear. I actually haven’t checked where Firefox stores the passwords as I am not using it to store my passwords but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is stocked somewhere in the profile folder. So even though your Dropbox folder is private and probably encrypted on the server, better be safe than sorry. So use other password manager (like keypass for instance). You’ve been warned and can’t blame me if anything goes wrong ;-)
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Ok, this post was no rocket science :-). However, it gives a good overview of what you can do with the so-called “cloud” in order not only to keep your documents synchronized but your preferences. I am sure that you can use the method with other softwares but as mention previously, always keep the security in mind! Find out if the application store any password or personal information before adventuring yourself with such a solution.
Based on the scenario presented above, I am sure that one could easily put a more secure solution in place. One could for instance store the profile in an encrypted container (with truecrypt) that would be mounted at start-up. Using Dropbox is not the only solution of course. One could use his own folder anywhere on the web mounted as a network drive over ssh. I am sure that you can come up with many ideas about how to generalize the suggested idea…
In my previous post, I detailed how I partitioned the drive of the X200 in order to install Linux. I will now give a few words about the installation process of Linux Mint 7. The focus of this post is set on how to keep your boot loader as it is and allow a dual boot windows/Linux from the Windows boot loader.
There are only a few things that I changed from the default installation. The first one concerns the partitioning. Since the drive is already partitioned, it is necessary to tell the installer which partitions to use for what. From the picture below, you can easily see which partitions are used and where they are mounted.
The important thing is to mount /boot on the primary partition created previously (/dev/sda4 in the example above). I decided to create a partition for /home as well so that a future upgrade of the system doesn’t overwrite personal data. This is a good common practice unless upgrade means global cleaning to you.
During the last step of the installation process, it is important to click on the advanced button if you don’t want Grub to be installed on the MBR. As stated in introduction, I want to keep the MBR so I specified that Grub should be installed on the primary partition that was created (/dev/sda4).
When installation is finished, restart the computer. There is at the moment no possibility to boot Linux as the MBR as not be replaced and no entry has been added to Windows boot file. It is therefore necessary first to reboot the live CD so that we can copy Linux boot sector. To do so, open a terminal and enter the following command:
In the command line above, don’t forget to indicate the correct paths to the if and of parameters so that it reflects your installation. Note that in the example above I am copying the boot sector to a USB stick and it is necessary afterwards to copy from the USB stick to the C drive of windows.
When the boot sector is copied, we can copy it in a windows accessible folder and edit C:\boot.ini.If there is any problem to edit it, don’t forget to remove the Read-Only flag by right click > Properties. My boot.ini looks like the following:
[boot loader] timeout=15 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect c:\linux.bin="Linux-Mint"
You can specify the timeout and default system to start by modifying the line below [boot loader]. You will notice that when you chose the Linux-Mint entry, Grub will be called offering you some more options.
If you want more detailed instructions concerning the dual boot procedure, I can recommend the following articles:
I wanted to install Linux on my computer (Lenovo X200) but I was a bit afraid to mess with the partition table due to the fact that there is a hidden Restore & Recovery partition available at boot up when one press on the ThinkVantage button.
I did want to keep Windows available as there are a few programs that can come handy and I didn’t want to mess with the default behavior of the computer (understand that the ThinkVantage button should still work, that windows should still be accessible and that I can basically still use the laptop the way I used to do :-)).
I will explain in the following paragraphs how to reformat the drive using open source tools and how I created the new partitions for the X200.
Make sure that you computer can boot on a USB stick (most recent computer can if the option is set up properly in the BIOS) and make sure that your USB stick is bootable. You can as well install it on the hardrive but if it boots from the harddrive, it may not allow to reformat the drive.
Partition the disk
I have divided the process in two parts:
Resize the Windows partition (followed by a reboot to verify that windows AND the recovery partition are accessible)
Create the new partitions
Before resizing the windows partition, do not forget to defragment the disk so that there is no risk of data loss and to create a backup of your data. To resize, just boot on the USB stick and execute GParted. The interface is quite intuitive and many good tutorials exist online. Resizing is the easy part and can take a while so just be patient. Once resized, restart the computer and you will notice that Windows does a check of the drive at startup. The only problem I noticed was related to the icon of the C drive but I will come to that later.
Now that we have some unused space, we can create the partitions that we want (reboot on the USB stick one more time to access GParted). The number of primary partitions is limited to 4 so we will create one extended partition (that will contain many logical partitions) and one primary partition. We need the primary partition in order for Linux to boot without installing the bootloader on the Master Boot Record (MBR).
The partitions I have created can be easily seen on the picture above but here is a quick explanation of the steps:
Create an extended partition (just leave around 200 MB at the end)
Create an primary partition in the last 200 MB that you left in the first step
Within the extended partition, create logical partitions. I have created the following:
Two NTFS partitions
One partition that will be for Linux root
One partition for Linux home
One partition for swap
Next time Windows restart, there is two more drives available but as mentioned, the only problem was related to the icon of the C drive. In order to fix it, launch TweakUI and go the Repair section to rebuild icons. Restart the computer and everything should be back to normal.
