Sharing a profile between Windows and Linux

This article was written for Thunderbird but also applies to Mozilla Suite / SeaMonkey (though some menu sequences may differ).

There are several ways to share a profile between Windows and Linux. Normally any shared files are stored on a FAT32 volume. The two main approaches seems to be:

• Literally share the profile between the two operating systems. Avoid using any Windows pathnames in prefs.js (use relative paths). One potential problem is that some extensions (such as Lightning) have separate downloads for Linux and Windows.

• Share everything except for the settings, themes, and extensions. Separate profiles are created for each operating system to avoid problems in prefs.js due to Windows naming conventions. Each profile is configured to store the mail directories and the local folder directory outside of the profile in common directories on the FAT32 volume and a symlink is used in the Linux profile to access the address books stored in the Windows profile. If you use Lightning create another symlink to storage.sdb . Each profile uses its own extensions directory for extensions and themes, so it doesn't matter if the extensions are operating system specific or not.

The most well known article is called "How To Share Mail Between Windows and Linux" and used to be at http://texturizer.net/thunderbird/share_mail.html . Its still available on the wayback machine at this web page. It also seems to be plagiorized at this web page

Some other articles to read are:

• Email:Sharing your Thunderbird profile It also discusses how to configure GnuPG and the Enigmail extension for both operating systems.

• Common Netscape Profile for Linux and Windows

• Dual booting using Portable Thunderbird

Most articles talk about using FAT32 volumes for shared files because there were poor choices for writing to NTFS partitions at the time. You might consider using NTFS-3g to provide full read/write access to NTFS instead of using a FAT32 partition. Another possibility is to use the Ext2 Installable File System for Windows to access ext3 partitions from Windows.

See also

• Moving your mail storage location - Thunderbird

External links

• A SeaMonkey General forum thread about problems sharing profiles between Windows and Linux.
• A Thunderbird forum thread about sharing the address book and calendar when dual booting.
• A thread in a Libranet forum on how to get Firefox and Thunderbird to work on both Windows and Linux.
• Linux-NTFS project
• Bug report about "All profile contents should use cross-platform formats". It states compreg.dat (list of registered XPCOM components) , xpti.dat (list of registered XPCOM interfaces) and the fastload file (xul.mfl) are platform-dependent.