linuxsysconfig

By default firefox saves your bookmarks to

You can see there a bunch of *.json files.

If you use more than one machine or you’ve recently changed / reinstalled your OS and you want to restore the old bookmarks, you need to import them manually:

• backup your bookmarks files to a safe location e.g.
  cp -r ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/bookmarkbackups user@other_machine:~

• on your new / other machine, open firefox then go to Organize Bookmarks
• go to Import and Backup –> Restore and choose the most recent file from the list of *.json files that you previously copied

That’s it. You can now use your bookmarks. There are, of course, other (more elegant) solutions such as using a browser addon (e.g. Xmarks) but some people are concerned about privacy, or they just don’t want to complicate things.

A new maintenance release of Oracle VirtualBox has been announced. Vbox 3.2.8 is a minor update which fixes several performance and stability issues. Fedora and Ubuntu users who enabled the virtualbox repo should get notified and prompted to install the update.

Links:

• changelog
• download page for all platforms

I’m not sure how many of you still read magazines, but I do it on occasion. I read this month’s issue of the PCLinuxOS magazine and I found some really interesting articles such as the video encoding tutorial and the XFCE customization.

You can download the magazine or browse it online.

Thunderbird 3.1.2 has been released, adding fixes to improve stability and the user interface. I’m using Fedora 13 and the update isn’t available yet in the official repositories.

I could use an unofficial repo, such as Remi, to get the updates more quickly, but the easiest way for me is to use the precompiled binaries from Mozilla, available for download as a tar.bz2 archive. This way, I’ll always get notified when an update is available and –just two clicks away — I’ll be running the latest version.

Here’s how you can do it:

• download the archive to /opt
  $ cd /opt ; wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/releases/3.1.2/linux-i686/en-US/thunderbird-3.1.2.tar.bz2
• unpack it
  tar jxvf thunderbird-3.1.2.tar.bz2
• remove the tarball
  rm thunderbird-3.1.2.tar.bz2
• run it using
  /opt/thunderbird/thunderbird
• add a launcher to the panel — Right click on the main panel –> Add to Panel –> Custom Application Launcher –> Add

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