Failure migrating Firefox and Thunderbird from openSUSE 11.2 to 11.3

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#1

Hi there,

to get my system from 11.2 to 11.3, I made a clean, new install instead of an upgrade. (I also used the opportunity to change to a new, bigger harddrive.)

I installed Mozilla Thunderbird from the repositories and (using the root account) tried to replace the automatic entry in .thunderbird with my own cryptic-named folder which I copied in from external storage. I changed the target name in the profiles.ini to my folder’s name. (I also made sure that although “root” did the copying, my main user is still the owner of all folders and files.)
Same procedure for Firefox (except for the installation part).

I made the same kind of copying for the OpenOffice “user”-folder and Office came up with all my individual settings.

But both Firefox and Thunderbird gave a failure notice, telling that “the program is already running, but does not react. In order to open a new window, you need to shutdown the existing process or restart your computer.”
(Original German: “Thunderbird wird bereits ausgeführt, reagiert aber nicht. Um ein neues Fenster öffnen zu können, müssen Sie zuerst den bestehenden Thunderbird-Prozess beenden oder ihren Computer neu starten.”)

I restarted the computer several times, but to no avail.
Has anyone had similar problems?
Has anyone a fix or a recommendation?
(Obviously, I would hate to loose all my emails, settings and bookmarks.)

(A similar (or the same) bug was reported two years ago, but it seems that no solution was reached see []Thunderbird läßt sich nicht mehr starten - linuxforen.de – User helfen Usern.)

Thanks for reading!

#2

I went from 11.1 to 11.3

I simply deleted the .mozilla and .thunderbird directories after I installed thunderbird from /home/flamebait and dropped my old .mozilla and .thunderbird directories in their place.
You could just rename those to .mozillanew and .thunderbirdnew insted of deleting them.

This may be the wrong way to do it but it worked for me.

#3

Why are you logging into root? This is not advised, and isn’t necessary to transfer your files.

#4

I am pretty sure he meant he installed Thunderbird as root. It’s hard to install software if you are not root.

One thing I left out that I set my new user id to the same value as it was on the previous install. If they doesn’t match you will not be able to access your old .mozilla and .thunderbird files.
This setting is accessed from YAST.

#5

It doesn’t sound like that here:

I also made sure that although “root” did the copying, my main user is still the owner of all folders and files.

There may be permissions problems in the profiles.

#6

You are right. My bad. If there were ownership problems he would have needed to be root.
Which I think will be solved if he matches the user id of his new install and old install.

#7

He simply needs to copy the files over in his new user account. Ownership of the copied files will be transfered over. As long as he has read permission, nothing else is necessary.

#8

If the old files have a user id of 500 and new install has a user id of 1000 those files are not his.
I have encounted this problem.

#9

If foo is owned by uid 1001, and uid 1000 copies this to ~/bar, the copy in ~/bar will be owned by uid 1000. Test this.

#10

“…to get my system from 11.2 to 11.3, I made a clean, new install instead of an upgrade.”

The User ID on one install of openSUSE with the same user name on a new install of openSUSE can end up wiht two different User Ids. This happend to me. Until I figured it out with some help from the forums I had permission problems.

If old user Foo has a User ID of 500 and the new User Foo has a User ID of 1000 User Foo with a User ID of 1000 can’t access user Foo with an User ID of 500’s files. This happened to me.
If you are trying to tell me this didn’t happen to me you are mistaken since it did. The User ID must match not just the User Name.

#11

On Fri, 10 Sep 2010 04:06:01 GMT, FlameBait
<FlameBait@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:

>
>"…to get my system from 11.2 to 11.3, I made a clean, new install
>instead of an upgrade."
>
>The User ID on one install of openSUSE with the same user name on a new
>install of openSUSE can end up wiht two different User Ids. This happend
>to me. Until I figured it out with some help from the forums I had
>permission problems.
>
>If old user Foo has a User ID of 500 and the new User Foo has a User ID
>of 1000 User Foo with a User ID of 1000 can’t access user Foo with an
>User ID of 500’s files. This happened to me.
>If you are trying to tell me this didn’t happen to me you are mistaken
>since it did. The User ID must match not just the User Name.

I missed the user 500 the first time, it is in a different privledge
class.

#12

Thank you a lot for your inputs.

As it turns out, Chief_sealth is right - I shouldn’t have used root. I did so because I had to copy several folders into several different user accounts and figured it would safe time to do them all simultaneously as root - I admit that I was a lazy. (I had made sure not to be connected to the web while logging on as root, though).

Afterwards I used the properties-menu in each of the accounts to mark the respective user as owner again (and of course checked the “include subfolders”-box).
Which (after some more random experimenting) turned out to be the problem!
For some reason, openSUSE did not apply these owner changes to the .mozilla and .thunderbird-folders (maybe because they are hidden?). So I reassigned these folders themselves to their intended owners. They are working well now with all the mails and bookmarks that should be there.

I realize that I created my users in pretty much the same order as on the last install. By this I might have avoided the 1000-1001-etc problem mentioned by FlameBait, although I (definitely) didn’t use the same user names in all instances.
(Or maybe the Mozilla products are by now so well written that they won’t stumble over such an obstacle any more?)

#13

Try changing the owner before transferring the files. In the directory containing the backup Firefox profile,

*sudo chown -R <userid>:<groupid> **

<userid> and <groupid> are your user and group id numbers. Then copy:

cp -R * ~/.mozilla/firefox/<profileid>

Substitute your Firefox profile id for <profileid>. Do not do this as root. Ownership will be changed over to root if you do.

Be sure to kill any running instances of Firefox before doing this. Try starting a new Firefox session after copying the files.

#14

On 2010-09-12 00:06, Caecilius wrote:
>
> Thank you a lot for your inputs.
>
> As it turns out, Chief_sealth is right - I shouldn’t have used root. I
> did so because I had to copy several folders into several different user
> accounts and figured it would safe time to do them all simultaneously as
> root - I admit that I was a lazy. (I had made sure not to be connected
> to the web while logging on as root, though).

It is possible to do it as root, but you must not make mistakes. I do such restore operations as
root myself - in text mode, and using “mc” as file browser.

> Afterwards I used the properties-menu in each of the accounts to mark
> the respective user as owner again (and of course checked the “include
> subfolders”-box).
> Which (after some more random experimenting) turned out to be the
> problem!
> For some reason, openSUSE did not apply these owner changes to the
> mozilla and .thunderbird-folders (maybe because they are hidden?). So I
> reassigned these folders themselves to their intended owners. They are
> working well now with all the mails and bookmarks that should be there.

I fail to see what “properties-menu” you are talking about. I simply use the “find” command to
change the owner or properties of entire trees. A sample:

find /data/something/ -type f -exec chmod u+r+w,g+r+w ‘{}’ ;
find /data/something/ -type d -exec chmod u+r+w+x,g+w+r+x ‘{}’ ;

In your case, you would use “chown”, not chmod. See the manual to learn the exact syntax.

Or, again, I use “mc”, as root.

> I realize that I created my users in pretty much the same order as on
> the last install. By this I might have avoided the 1000-1001-etc problem
> mentioned by FlameBait, although I (definitely) didn’t use the same user
> names in all instances.

Notice that you can specify the user id number when you create a new user in Yast.

> (Or maybe the Mozilla products are by now so well written that they
> won’t stumble over such an obstacle any more?)

Simply copy the entire .mozilla directory. I have never had problems. Or copy the “inside” of the
strangely named directory - no need to edit the .ini file that way.

If it fails, I still have the original tree, I can retry.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” GM (Elessar))