Migrating Firefox/Thunderbird from Linux to OS X

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

Today, I completed my migration of my personal machine to one that runs OS X. For those not following Twitter, I picked up a MacBook Air last week, and have slowly been moving my stuff off from the Dell. The Dell can now serve as a full development machine, and I can start running “unstable” Linuxes on it now (”unstable” like Rawhide).

But I digress. This is about how I moved Thunderbird and Firefox over to my new box.

Thunderbird:
Copy ~/.thunderbird over, and place it in ~/Library/Thunderbird on OS X. Only problem I found was with the Lightning plugin, which managed to grab itself an update, and all was dandy.

Firefox:
Copy ~/.mozilla/firefox over, and place it in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox. All the plugins I had, just ran fine.

Only snag? I couldn’t find a copy of Firefox 2 online. Good thing I had a copy on another Mac… Why did I need Firefox 2? Google Browser Sync. Though I suspect that in the very near future, I’ll move over to Mozilla Weave, and get all my systems up to speed with Firefox 3.

Next up, lets see how long I run OS X on the Air… or do I replace it with Linux if it annoys me significantly enough?

Firefox Download Day

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

Its the Firefox Download Day. That not only means Firefox 3 is out, it also means that they’re trying to set a world record, by getting the most downloads of a software package in 24-hours. There’s a nice world map, similar to the kind you might have seen in presentations by Jonathan Schwartz (ok, I prefer seeing the dots per region, rather than the Firefox one :P).

The pending general availability of MySQL 5.1 was announced in April at the MySQL Conference. While I’ve seen 1,400+ attendees (a pleasant problem for the event organisers, as they scurried to get people into overflow rooms, and herd the crowd during food times) show up at the Tech Days in the Philippines, I’m wondering if we can achieve 3 million downloads (the current Firefox counter) within 24-hours? Database software just isn’t as sexy as a web browser… Thats not to say we cannot aim high.

How would you celebrate the release of MySQL 5.1 GA? Worldwide release parties (ala Ubuntu)? Set an aim for “n-number of downloads” in 24-hours?

P/S: Like live stats? Look at the Mozilla Download Counter. Its live, and very cool