Keeping Your Firefox Data Synced

Have you ever had that experience where you really want to show a friend this cool bookmark and then found it's on your other partition, or other computer?

I triple-boot my laptop, which is nice for having a bit of variety but not so much for my Firefox bookmarks and such, as sometimes I forget which OS I had site X bookmarked on and I lose time rebooting and finding it. But luckily I stumbled across a post which told me how to sync my Ubuntu and Windows Firefox profiles, it was a little out of date but I gave it a shot and hey presto it worked! Not only did it work it allowed me to do the same thing with my Hackintosh partition too. Brilliant.

The common denominator here was Windows, or at least an NTFS partition that can be written to and read from by everything you want synced. FAT would work fine though. Get yourself one of these, a Windows partition will work great.

Step 1 – You need to figure out what exactly you want synced. Is it separate systems on a single machine or is it to be spread across machines? If it's separate systems on a single machine you will want to make sure you use a Windows partition or create a new NTFS or FAT partition for the purpose, and that this is mounted automatically by whatever other system you'll be using. I believe OS X will do this on a Mac by default and Linux can be set to automatically mount it at startup. If you'll be syncing data across machines I suggest using something that will ALWAYS be available – Network drives will work best, but what happens if you take your laptop elsewhere? A thumbdrive would work but would be rather faffy, so I would recommend using a Dropbox account to sync the data if you're to be doing this across a laptop and a Desktop.

Step 2 – You need to access the Firefox profile manager to create a new profile, unless you can move your current profile to somewhere universally available. To access profile manager make sure that Firefox is completely shut down. If you'e not sure use killall or an equivalent command. (Ctrl+Q or Cmd+Q). Then:

Linux - Enter a terminal then type firefox -profilemanager (bear in mind if you installed Firefox via a tarball in /opt/ you will need to change this to /opt/firefox/firefox-bin -profilemanager)

OS X – Again enter a terminal and, presuming Firefox is in the Applications folder type /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -profilemanager

Windows – Start>Run then type firefox.exe -profilemanager (or firefox.exe -p)

Step 3 – Create a new profile. Firefox will guide you through this dead easily so there's no need for a screenshot. Where it states the location of the new profile you want to choose your own folder, then browse for it. Choose whatever medium you're going to be using, a Network share, a Dropbox, whatever. Then create it, select it and check “Don't ask a start-up” to ensure Firefox will use this by default.

Step 4 – Repeat steps 2 and 3 on the subsequent system(s) you want to share the data. Except this time when you create a new profile you should browse to where you create the profile last time, and go into it. There will be all the different files and folders that Firefox uses to do the profile thing, just OK it and boot Firefox as normal using this profile. Everything should be there.

There you have it, Firefox is all synced up. This should work fine for other Mozilla products too, such as Thunderbird and Seamonkey. I have no idea if it works on Sunbird. Any questions or if you think this post needs screenshots just comment below.

When did hard drives become so big? (SSDs too)

Most people don't pay attention to how spacious their storage drive is until it's running out of room and you have to start deciding which documents aren't important anymore. I don't think we can actually run out of room now.

I was pricing up 2.5” drives the other day, mainly out of boredom but for potential use in my laptop when I inevitably run out of storage. Now I'd like to think I'm up on all the latest developments, and if you're not into computers all that much I'd like to think I appear as a god; however Western Digital were about to make my jaw drop – sitting there nestled amongst the 2.5” drive category was a Western Digital Scorpio Blue with a storage capacity of 1TB! When did this happen? I didn't think we had broken the 750GB mark on 2.5” drives, what with all the attention being focused on SSD developments. Did I miss the memo? I'm genuinely astounded, pleased and a little bit jealous I can't afford one. With that little beauty sitting in my beloved laptop I would ooze smugness as I never ran out of space when even bulky Windows installs wouldn't dent the drive's capacity.

But that's not all either – according to Crunch Gear in 2008 we hit another milestone with the SSDs, as Toshiba announced a cheeky little SSD that smashes the competition by doubling the previous capacity to 512GB – when did this happen and why was I not informed!? That doesn't seem a lot considering I've just mentioned a 1TB drive, and that (as far as I know) desktop HDDs have reached 2TB, but bear in mind that this is solid state and therefore brilliant for just being that. No moving parts, speeds to dream of and now a storage capacity to rival the average desktop's.

As mentioned earlier, desktop HDDs are now roughly in the region of 2TB (unless another development has slipped me by) which is quite astonishing as only a year ago you'd pay for 1TB what you're likely to pay for the two now. My question is this; do we really need THAT much storage space?

The answer, I believe, is yes. We do. Consider the changing trend in how media is transferred and stored, optical storage has become a thing of the past now as even entire Operating Systems can be stuck on a USB drive and installed or ran that way. Films are available in digital formats, sometimes even without DRM and the same goes for music – those that aren't can be legally and quickly turned into a digital movie file. And as people become more and more involved in this digital renaissance its going to take up more and more room on their hard drives; I know of several people who have a separate hard drive dedicated simply to their digital media.

Also consider software. Admittedly as drive-capacity increases so does our ability to produce less bulky and more efficient programs – Windows 7 takes up less space than Vista did (although that wasn't too hard), Linux systems can be tweaked to barely make a footprint and even the latest OS X claims to be able to free up taken up by the previous version. This development in how to write less bulky software is almost cancelled out by the sheer amount of software on an average person's computer – if they're a gamer they'll have games (which can be extremely bulky), not to mention plug-ins and mods for those games, they'll have photo and movie editing software, office software, music software (either a jukebox or an editing suite) amongst other things; there might even be a revolutionary new type of software just round the corner that everyone will end up needing.

So, does this mean we need to push the capacity of our storage drives to the absolute maximum? Even with cloud computing rearing its alien head we still do a lot on our local machines. I think we need to continue pressing onwards, let's hope that by 2015 we're sitting down at our desktop machines with 10TB drives and wondering how we ever coped when we measured in Gigabytes.

Moving the Other Way

There's an uncountable number of blogs and posts and articles about how easy/hard/different the process of switching from Windows to Linux is. Usually the distro of choice is Ubuntu or one of its variants and sometimes Fedora. Nobody ever talks about how hard it is moving the other way, about how difficult moving from a Linux environment to a Windows environment is...

I recently bought a new hdd for my laptop because I was running out of space. I used to have an 80GB drive which I then partitioned and dual-booted Ubuntu 9.04 (my distro of choice for laptops) and a Hackintosh distro. So you can imagine I was low on space.

After the new drive was installed I decided what would be nice is a triple-boot system, and since I'd no idea how to make Linux recognise BSD partitions, or even how to install them side-by-side I thought a Linux, Mac OS and Windows setup would do the job nicely. I installed Hackintosh with some difficulty, installed Windows 7 (from a legitimate source I can assure you) and then installed Ubuntu to the rest of the drive (which happened to be roughly half of it). After I got my Ubuntu partition looking how I like it, with themes etc. I went into GRUB and added entries to point towards my other two systems. Hackintosh still wasn't working at this point due to a graphics error so I went in to explore Windows 7 for the first time.

For the last two years, roughly, I've been Windows-free. I've installed it on other people's machines but my computer has remained an anti-Microsoft zone for a long time now. This was an extremely disorientating process moving back to Windows and one that was not entirely pleasant. Firstly, there are several distinct features that had become staples of my life as a Linux-user that Windows 7 lacks. Here's a quick list of things that I feel are missing or done badly in Windows 7:

• Virtual Desktops – Linux has them; has had them for a while. BSD has them. Even Mac OS has them in the form of 'Spaces' now. Windows doesn't. I'm a multitasker by nature. I'm used to having at least four virtual desktops open and being able to switch between them with a quick keyboard command. Windows 7 doesn't do that. I'm stuck with one desktop and this fills up and become cluttered extremely quickly, if I minimise everything its annoying to have to click on it to bring it back into view because this takes up my precious time. If Windows 7 was your idea you must be agoraphobic; because its a small enclosed space that prevents me from doing my work quickly.

• Customisable Taskbars – OK, you can pin things to the taskbar. However, if you pin as many of the programs as I'm used to having in a dock or on a toolbar in Linux you run out of room fast. I was left with about half of the space I had originally once I had pinned everything I needed to pin. I'm used to being able to create a new toolbar (GNOME Panel) and being able to add whatever I want to it, being able to place it wherever I want within reason. With Windows 7 I can choose the orientation of the taskbar.

• No Office Suite – When I first installed Linux I was amazed by the fact that OpenOffice had been pre-installed for me; this was a familiar software suite which I used almost daily and some lovely people at Ubuntu HQ thought “Ooh, lets install it for them”. Now I'm pissed off that my Windows 7 didn't even come with MS Works. Mind you, OS X doesn't come with an Office Suit either.

• New fears – As a Linux user I didn't have to worry much about viruses/spyware. You can argue whether this is the lack of sheer market share that Linux possesses or the way its structured or how the users run it. I don't mind. Point is Linux is a hostile environment for most viruses. That being said I only ever encountered a virus once in my entire three years of using Windows XP and that was without any form of protection (Insert your own pun). Windows kindly reminds me every time I login that I need to download AntiVirus software. I think my time as a Linux-only guy has rubbed off because I run my system in a more Linuxy way, setting specific permissions for programs etc. but I've a nagging feeling every time I log in. Maybe I should download the free security software out there...but that would take up disk space.

• Can't Read/Write to file-systems other than NTFS and FAT## - OK I know Linux requires NTFS-3g but that's bundled with most distros. I would like to be able to see my other partitions (for Linux and Hackintosh) in the My Computer screen but no. I can't. Meh.

There are several other things that bug me, but they're just little things about the usability and I'd be complaining for the sake of complaining. All in all Windows 7 is a good Operating System, whether its worth the money you have to pay for it is a different matter. Its easily the best Windows yet and MS actually outdid themselves on this one. It runs on relatively low-spec hardware with ease, looks nice, UAC isn't set into overdrive and its fairly secure from what I've read/seen.

I just prefer Linux.

The Internet Is Awesome

Was told this to embed this in a site/blog. So here it is



Created by Online Education

Don't buy a WD External HDD

Seriously. Don't. I've not exactly had the best of luck with external drives over the years, I've had a 1TB Freecom drive that lost connection every two minutes, and now this. Firstly. Its listed as 500GB. Now, as a geek I know that when a drive is listed as 500GB; what the company probably means is 500GiB, so that didn't phase me too much. Its a problem with most modern external drives, and when people plug in their drive expecting 500GB of space, they're left wondering “Where the hell did 35GB go!?”.

The drive I bought was a "My Passport Essential Portable, 500GB, Black" from Play.com and it was relatively good pricing at £82.99

What did piss me of royally, however is Western Digital's “WD Smartware”. This really got me going. I hate the U3 system, always have, so when I saw this I face-palmed big style. When I stuck the drive into my Linux partition, the drive mounted as expected but so did a virtual CD with Smartware software loaded on. I rolled my eyes, copied a few files across to test the waters and then rebooted into my OSx86 partition to make sure everything was fine over there. It wasn't. The Smartware mounted again, but I ignored it once again and tried to move some files to the drive; but the drive wasn't having any of it. I checked the permissions and apparently I didn't have write access. Getting angry again, I cursed the WD Smartware and formated the drive fully expecting to win and be rid of that annoying Smartware once and for all. I even opened up a victory can of Dr. Pepper. Alas nay, the virtual cd still mounted! I did a bit of research and apparently the Smartware VCD is actually WD's firmware and built into the drive. So I'm stuck with it. I can now read/write without a problem on all of my systems but I had to jump through hoops to do it. So a quick note to anyone from WD: When I buy an external hard drive, all I want is an external hard drive, you don't know what I want/need, if you have software you think I may benefit from then stick it on a disc and not as firmware that I could gladly be rid of. Not good WD.

Aside from that though, the drive is nice. Fairly good speeds, and enough storage capacity so that I won't need another drive for a little while. Compact, and USB powered. Might look into making a protector for it though, as the plastic casing feels rather fragile.

How To Successfully Dual Boot Hackintosh (OSx86) and Ubuntu Linux (Will also work with all GNU/Linux systems using GRUB)

A little while ago, after getting pig-sick of my Apple iBook, I bought my current Acer laptop from a friend who is quite the expert in all things Hackintosh. Liking OS X quite a bit, but being a GNU/Linux user at heart, I decided to try dual boot the two. What followed was about a week of sweat tears and uncountable "FFS"s. However, after doing it right finally, I wrote a little tutorial on how to do it and posted it on my Geeks blog. So, here's Infected Mentality's first proper post, lifted almost in its entirety from the original; How To Successfully Dual Boot Hackintosh and Ubuntu Linux

There are loads of tutorials out there on how to Dual-boot pretty much any combination of Operating Systems, and I felt it was about time I contributed my part on how to dual boot two of my favourite ones: Ubuntu Linux and OSx86.

There are several methods to achieving this, however after trying and failing for about a week, myself and a friend finally managed to get it working – turns out it was as easy as pie and we were trying to do all the wrong things. This is how we finally did it, after numerous reinstalls.

To achieve this setup you will need the following:

- At least one writable DVD
- At least one writable CD
- A program which can burn .iso files to disc. I recommend ImgBurn if you're running Windows. Burn if you're running OS X and K3B if you're on Linux (K3B is designed to run in KDE however I've had no problems running it in GNOME)
- A torrent client. µTorrent for Windows or Transmission for OS X and Linux is recommended.


Part 1 - The Hackintosh

1) Get yourself a a Hackintosh distro. These can be acquired via a quick search on most torrent sites or a visit to the OSx86 Project Wiki. There are loads of distros available, most commonly used are:
- iATKOS
- iPC (This is the distro we used.)
- iDeneb
- Kalyway (This has a reputation for being one of the easiest Hackintosh distros to get set up.)


2) Burn the .iso file to a dvd. It's advisable to set your write speed to the minimum possible and to tell your burner to verify the data, for this will ensure less errors in the write.

3) Make sure your computer is set to boot from CD. This can be done via the BIOS. The laptop we used has an option to access a boot menu at startup by pressing F12, which allowed us to choose which device to boot from. If this is an option for you then that's probably your best bet.

4) Insert your OSx86 cd and boot from it.

5) Some distros try to run as Vanilla as possible, if your distro is one of these (iPC, the distro we used is one) you should be presented with a message at boot giving an option to press any key to change how the disc boots. If this is an option for you, do this now.

6) Insert the following line: idlehalt=0 -v and then hit Enter. idlehalt=0 disables the disabler, which would normally prevent the install disc from loading on a non-Apple computer. -v disables a feature called Silent Boot. Normally, when the Apple OS is loading a white background with a grey apple is shown, -v shows the bootscript behind that, allowing you to check for errors. If your distro loads the installer without any need for this command just ignore this step.

7) Once the installer is loaded, click continue past the first stage. As soon as the menubar on the top is loaded, go to Utilities>Disk Utility.
8) Select your Hdd and choose Partition. The partition scheme I recommend is 2 partitions for ease of install. The first partition must be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and the second one is best formatted as empty space. You can name your Mac OS Partition whatever you want, I named mine sda1 for simplicity's sake.

9) After Disk Utility has finished setting up your partition scheme, return to the installer and proceed through it until you reach the point where you are asked which Volume to install the OS on. The volume listed should be sda1 (or whatever you named it). Select the volume and click continue.

10) You MUST customise your install. I don't know what your hardware specs are but you need to select drivers for your chipset and graphics card etc. Visit the InsanelyMac forums to assist you with this stage, or if your distro has a forum, use that.

11) After install, reboot your computer and remove the disc. The bootloader should load up again. If you can, boot with idlehalt=0 -v again. This will allow you to see if the bootloader freezes at a particular line.

12) If you're all booted and lovely, you need to remove the disabler.kext if your distro does not do this for you. Just find it (use Spotlight), and send it to the Trash. Then empty the trash. Justice is swift.

13) Configure your OSx86 install to your liking. If you're on a laptop you may need to find Wireless drivers, battery monitor fixes and the like. Other than that, change your wallpaper, install some software, play around.


Part 2 – Installing Ubuntu.

1) Head over to ubuntu.com and download the latest version of Ubuntu. Use your disc burning software to burn the .iso file to disc. Remember to set the burn speed to the minimum to ensure a good write with no errors.

2) Pop in the disc and boot from it.

3) Select your language. At the install options I'd suggest booting into the LiveCD (Try Ubuntu without any changes to your computer) just to check most of your hardware will work properly. After you've messed around for a bit just click on the install icon on the desktop and go through the installation until you reach the screen which asks you on how you want Ubuntu to partition the disk.

4) Click on “Manual” for your partition scheme. The disk should be split into two, the Mac partition and the free space. Click on the free space and create a partition. Set the partition size as double your amount of RAM (1GB = 1024MB) and the partition type as Swap.

5) Select the remainder of your free space and use it for the root partition, the mount point should be /.

6) Proceed with the installation, rebooting when prompted.

7) When you reboot your computer, you'll notice that GRUB, the bootloader, doesn't recognise that there are two Operating Systems as it would if you were dual-booting with Windows and loads straight into Ubuntu. Don't worry.

8) Configure Ubuntu to your liking, make sure your internet is working etc. I recommend making sure you let Ubuntu install the updates before proceeding to configure GRUB, in my case Ubuntu needed to install around 250 updates. After that you'll need to restart the computer and you can start messing round with the bootloader.

Part 3 – Configuring GRUB to boot OSx86

GRUB, the bootloader included with the latest release of Ubuntu, cannot boot your OSx86 partition by itself, so we're going to tell GRUB to pass down the bootstrap to the OSx86 bootloader to let it boot itself. This is a lot easier than it sounds but it requires a little bit of patience and a bit of playing round to get it right.

1) Boot into Ubuntu and open up a terminal.

2) Type sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst and enter your password when prompted. This brings up a text editor with instructions on how to play with GRUB.

3) In this file, everything with a hash (#) in front of it is ignored by GRUB; like notes in HTML. Look for where it says hiddenmenu or something along those lines, and stick a # in front of it. This is so you don't have to hit Escape every time you want to access your bootmenu and boot OSx86.

4) Next look for the part of GRUB where it displays your installed Kernels. This is normally near the bottom. If you look at it, they follow a basic formula. You'll be using slightly different commands but they achieve the same basic thing.

5) Create an entry for OSx86. Add the following lines:

title OSx86
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1


title is the name GRUB will display for the OS. This can be anything you want, mine's been called several things such as 'Hackintosh', 'OSx86' and 'Mac OS X 10.5'. Whatever you're comfortable with really.

root tells GRUB what to boot. The command we told it was (hd0,0) which is saying to GRUB “Boot from the first harddrive (hd0), using the first partition (,0)”. And this is the bit that'll cause the most trouble. When I was following a tutorial on how to get GRUB to recognise OSx86, I was told to type (hd0,1) which is obviously a completely different partition. If you attempt to boot into OSx86 and you get a message along the lines of “Error 15: Invalid Device” just go back into the GRUB menu.lst and change the partition number. Keep changing it until you boot properly

makeactive tells GRUB to set the active partition on the root disk to GRUB's root device

chainloader +1 This command will take the boot sector of the root and use it to boot. Like getting GRUB to load Darwin/Chameleon which will in turn boot OSx86.

6) Save your changes, exit gedit, cross your fingers and reboot. The boot menu should appear with all of your Ubuntu options (Generic, Recovery and memtest) and then the entry you created for OSx86. Select it and hit your enter key. If you get an error its not the end of the world, just boot back into Ubuntu and change the partition number in the root command for the entry and retry it.


That's it. Done and dusted. It's also a good idea to go back into menu.lst and change your timeout time. The default is 3 seconds, which doesn't give you much time to change your OS choice before loading it. I set mine at a nice 10 secs.

Another thing I did was remove all the extra kernel options from the boot menu. I did this for security reasons as well as for aesthetics, as I didn't want anyone booting into Ubuntu's safe mode and changing my root password; I however back up everything every five minutes, if deleting these entries may cause you to lose data if your main system becomes unusable don't do it.

Looking for Guest Posters

Infected Mentality is looking for Guest Posters to contribute to the Blog in order to get a variety of writing styles. If you're interested contact matthew.mrshll@googlemail.com.