[SLUG] Firefox and shared profiles

[Paul Teasdale]

Hi All,

At the last meeting Dave had the good thought of wondering whether it was 
possible to share one Firefox profile between different PCs and/or OSes. 
Having a little spare time over this holiday period I decided to give this a 
go this afternoon.

Firstly I decided to share a profile between two different Linux PCs using 
NFS. This does indeed work very well however I was very careful to ensure 
that the id of 'pdt' on PC A was the same as the id of 'pdt' on PC B 
otherwise there would have been a mismatch between user permissions. This 
could be solved with NIS but I'll leave that for another day.

Secondly I shared the profile between a Linux PC running Samba and my 
dual-boot laptop with Windows XP. Samba is configured act as a full domain 
controller therefore when I log on as 'pdt' I can access my Linux home 
directory without any further login prompts. This works very well also with 
no additional permission issues.

Finally I tried putting the Firefox profile on FAT32 area of disk (on my 
laptop) and using it from Firefox in Windows which worked fine. I then 
rebooted to Linux and tried using the same profile and this also worked fine.

So Dave your idea was a really good one and I shall certainly keep this 
configuration on my PCs.

For those interested you make Firefox use a different profile to the default 
one it creates by running:

$ firefox -profilemanager

This gives you a dialog where you can make Firefox point to any profile you 
wish (and indeed have multiple profiles). To make Firefox start different 
profiles types:

$ firefox -P <profile_name> 

where <profile_name> is the name of the profile you wish to use.

The above commands work under both Linux and Windows. I should also point out 
that in every case I used Firefox 1.5 and I'm not sure what would happen with 
different versions accessing the same profile. Also in the case of sharing 
the profile over a network I am not sure what would happen if you ran Firefox 
on both PCs simultaneously. It does actually appear to run on each PC but may 
have some undesired effects. Otherwise it works well.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Paul.
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