binary stumble

Hmm, my evening slowed down a bit when I downloaded Thunderbird 3, extracted it and didn’t really know what to do with the resulting files!

Turns out the answer is don’t be scared, just double click the file that says ‘thunderbird’ with no extension, and it starts up. Naturally, it starts asking you for a new account settings etc but I have all that info in the thunderbird profile I am now careful to store in my documents so that I can back my emails up periodically. Just quit out of this and perform a quick web search to remember the solution.

You have to cd to the programme folder (in my case, it’s still on the Desktop) and type ./thunderbird -profilemanager
These magic words open a little dialogue box. You want to create a new profile. Call it something obvious. I called mine ‘Dan’. Then click ‘Choose Folder’ and navigate to where you know your profile folder is (if you don’t, back up and look for this by consulting here). I was cautious and backed this folder up before I started. I recommend you do the same, although nothing went wrong with what I did, you can never backup enough.

That’s it really, clicking ok starts Thunderbird with this profile and next time, Thunderbird will open with this profile already selected.

On to mounting the windows partition at startup now before Soph comes back!

• Thunderbird – Email, Calendar (might migrate this to Evolution)
• Skype – VOIP, IM
• Viking – GPS visualisation with OpenStreetMaps
• Pure Data – Sound & Programming
• Unison – Cross-platform file synchronisation
• VLC – Cross-platform multi-media player

Is it really two years since I started using the Linux OS? Coming up to I think, I was in Banff for the first time, so it must have been November 2008.

Any road, with the release of the latest Long Term Support version, Lucid Lynx (10.04), I thought I’d take the plunge tonight while Soph’s out and update from Intrepid Ibex (8.10) to this (don’t tell her).

I had to do an install of the new OS because I haven’t been updating to the intermediate versions, so I was a bit nervous about it, hence setting aside a quiet evening.

To my great happiness, it seems to have all gone smoothly. First, I slightly adjusted the partitions on my laptop’s hard drive with the new GParted CD (0.5.2) I just wanted to make sure that the new OS had a bit of elbow room.

I downloaded the .iso from the Ubuntu site and burnt it, then put it in the computer and rebooted.

In GParted I took the precaution of noting down what device names belonged to what, by me it was sda1 – Windows sda2 – Windows recovery, sda3 – linux root (system), sda4 – linux home (my files and data). This helped me to confidently check sda3 for re-formatting and the location for the root folder and to select sda4 to be my home folder as far as the new system was concerned – REMEMBER: Don’t format home! You’ll loose all your files.

After whirring and grinding away for a while, it was asking me to restart and now I’m typing away on the new operating system.

I’ve now got to work out what I need in terms of software, get them from the repositories again and do a bit of re-fiddling – get the windows partition to mount at startup (the dropbox folder symlink isn’t working because of this), etc.