How to share bookmarks and passwords from Winxp and Linux?

I have a dual boot system.
WinXp Pro and Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

Can I do this using symlink to do this ?
I know the location of both items in WinXp and Ubuntu.
What I do not know is how to do it.

Winxp (fat32)location:
H:\moz_ff_pr (profile has been moved from normal place to off of c:drive to new location)

Ubuntu location:
home/ed/./fire/profiles/

I want to use the Winxp Firefox bookmarks in Ubuntu.

How do I do this?

For something like Firefox, copy the entire profile directory. You will also need to add the profile name to profile.ini

I doubt if moving passwords will be as easy.

you can export and importort bookmorks using the built in firefox thing on the bookmark manager.

passwords id hope are harder than just copying and pasting. if theyre encrypted well they wouldnt be able to be decrypted on other computers.(a good ecnryption will use something that is unuiqe abuot computers as a salt) youll probally have to click the view passwords button on the password manager on one computer and write them in as you need them

Both solutions provided above assume he wants to migrate his settings from windows to Linux, he wants to share, ie maintain the same ones in both operating systems, if he copies the profile he'll have to do that everytime it changes (could have a script do it at login) and if he imports bookmarks likewise.

This has been covered quite a few times before (use the LQ search) but i think a symlink could work, if the files differ somehow in their format, then it'd be a right pain.

you can link your windows one to the profile folder in ubuntu, and presumably if you moved it, it's on a read/write filesystem?

Excellent! You've already moved the profile to somewhere on a FAT32 partition. This means that both Windows and Linux can read/write this directory.

If you want to share the entire profile, then you can simply point Firefox to use the directory on the H: drive. I assume you already know that, and you'd rather NOT share the entire profile.

For sharing just the bookmarks, you want to use a symbolic link. A symbolic link is a special file you can make on any Linux partition that points to any other file in any file system (including non-Linux partitions like FAT32). Thus, you can create a link from /home/ed/fire/profiles/bookmarks.html into /mnt/h_drive/moz_ff_pr/bookmarks.html. (I'm assuming the H: drive is mounted to /mnt/h_drive.) Note that you can only create a link within a Linux partition. You can't create a link going the other way around.

In order to create this symbolic link, open up a terminal and use the following commands:
(Do this while Firefox isn't running.)

After creating this symbolic link, Firefox will happily use this symbolic linked file just as if it were a normal file within the /home/ed/fire/profiles/ directory. As far as Firefox is concerned, there's nothing different between a symlink and a normal file.

This is very different from the way things work in Windows. As you probably know, you can create "links" in Windows also. However, these files are NOT treated the same way as normal files. While Windows Explorer tries to hide the fact from the user, these "link" files are actually small normal files ending with the extension ".lnk". The .lnk extension is hidden in Windows Explorer even if you uncheck the option to hide file extensions. So, if you try to create a link to bookmarks.html in Windows, it actually just creates a file named bookmarks.html.lnk--so Firefox will just ignore it.

If you don't have many hosts, it will be easier simply to use the same password. If you use DOMAIN, or LDAP or AD security models in Samba, together with properly written PAM configurations, then you could change the password centrally for both Linux and Windows, provided that the Windows machine isn't XP home edition. On some distro's you can change the Logon method easily, and use would only need to set up a Samba server properly, however it would still be an involved process getting it set up properly, and probably wouldn't be worth the effort for a home network.

To IsaacKuo:

You are correct in that I do not want to share the whole profile. This being that some of the extension might not work in Linux and I would rather reload the the ones that work correctly.

I have few more questions before I proceed with this.
I want to understand what I am doing.
cd /home/ed/fire/profiles/
Here I change directories to my profile directory.

mv bookmarks.html bookmarksOLDBACKUP.html
Here I move commnand and create a copy of my orignal bookmarks in the same directory.

I have my drives automatically mounted on startup.
Therefore will I still be using the command as written even though the drives are mounted or will the command be changed?

ln -s /mnt/h_drive/moz_ff_pr/bookmarks.html
Or would change the command?
ln -s /h_drive/moz_ff_pr/bookmarks.html

I like to know extactly what I am doing. I will not just do what is suggested without knowledge of what the suggestion is going to do. So do not take this as offense of you help.

Thanks to all that replied.

you guys used 'foxmarks' or 'google bookmarks sync', they are both bookmarks synchronization tools and the google one has also other loads of options. they are firefox extensions. i find them pretty cool.

In the same theme:

For those who may be using Thunderbird on a dual boot system, a sim-link from the Linux Thunderbird mail profile to the Windows Thunderbird mail profile allows one mail-box to be shared across both installations.

The caveat as noted above is that Linux Thunderbird needs read/write access to the Windows partition, which requires either FAT32 or a Linux NTFS file system driver that supports write access.

Yes, exactly right.

You would change it to reflect wherever it is that the H drive is mounted automatically. In the example, I assumed that H: was mounted at /mnt/h_drive. Unless there's some amazing coincidence, it's probably not mounted there but somewhere else (maybe /mnt/hda7, or /media/hda8, or something like that). If you're not sure, look at the text file /etc/fstab.

You're welcome!

Sorry but I am still a little confused by your answer.
Yes, H:drive is automatically mounted at startup.
Is the term mnt use to point to a drive already mounted?

So which would I use?

ln -s /mnt/h_drive/moz_ff_pr/bookmarks.html
Or would change the command to?
ln -s /h_drive/moz_ff_pr/bookmarks.html

Hope this the last time.

No, /mnt/ is simply one common place to mount partitions in. I use it simply because Knoppix used it by default. For example, Knoppix would mount hda5 in /mnt/hda5/. I've since switched to Debian, which tends to mount partitions in /media/. But my habit is to use /mnt/, and there's no real reason to switch.

I don't know where Fedora likes to set up partition mounts by default. If you look at the contents of /etc/fstab, then you'll be able to see all of the mount points. (Well, probably--it may be using some sort of automatic mounting thingamagigy. In that case, look at /etc/mtab for all currently mounted partitions.)

/etc/fstab is a text file listing of all preset partition mounts. You can edit it to change what partitions are mounted on bootup and how they're mounted (position, file system, options). Traditionally, the OS could only automatically mount partitions specified in /etc/fstab (you could still manually specify all options in a "mount" command if you wanted). However, there have since been some developments with hot-pluggable hardware and such so that partitions not in the fstab could still get mounted. For example, in Debian Etch hot-plugged USB drives get mounted in /media/ even though there's no entry in /etc/fstab.

/etc/mtab looks like fstab, but it has a list of the CURRENTLY mounted partitions. You can't edit /etc/mtab for any meaningful purpose--any changes will just get trashed over when the OS reboots. Even if the H: partition isn't specified in /etc/fstab, you should be able to find it in /etc/mtab.

(fstab = file system table; mtab = mounted table)

Now, when you look at fstab or mtab, it will probably NOT be immediately obvious which partition is H:. You'll be able to tell which one it is if it's your only FAT32 partition--look for the partition which is in FAT format. If there's more than one, then you'll have to figure out which one it is by browsing the contents, or using the "df" command to figure out which one it is based on partition size.

You should really look into Google's Browser Sync extension (also above mentioned by prozac). It syncronizes your bookmarks, passwords, history, and restores tabs when you close and reopen firefox. You can disable anything you dont want sync'd. It does require a google account (gmail, etc...) here is a link to check it out:

http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/...ync/index.html