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Profile not working in Ubuntu

  • 3 replies
  • 2 have this problem
  • 10 views
  • Last reply by Zenos

DinghySailor
DinghySailor
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I have had profiles working under Windows 10, and had the files working well with the data on a backup drive. I am migrating to Ubuntu 17.04 on the same laptop, as a dual boot PC, and set up Thunderbird to use profiles, and pointed to the location on the external hard drive, but it would not work. I copied the files into Windows, and that failed the same way; so I copied the files to the Ubuntu partition, and again it fails. I have even copied the files to a folder in the same directory as the installed default profile, and as that failed, copied the default profile and copied my active files into that directory all to no avail. I have ensured that the profile.ini file is correct, and the emails are still not valid.

Thunderbird is 52.3.0.

When Thunderbird loads, sometimes it complains about DRAFT folder in my gmail account(s) not being read - but when I try to look at the accounts, no dialogue appears. There are no accounts to "get mail" from; and I cannot see any indication that any of the data has been read. However, there are no error messages indicating the profile is invalid.

The email data was working fine on Windows 10 yesterday.

Thank you for your help.

I have had profiles working under Windows 10, and had the files working well with the data on a backup drive. I am migrating to Ubuntu 17.04 on the same laptop, as a dual boot PC, and set up Thunderbird to use profiles, and pointed to the location on the external hard drive, but it would not work. I copied the files into Windows, and that failed the same way; so I copied the files to the Ubuntu partition, and again it fails. I have even copied the files to a folder in the same directory as the installed default profile, and as that failed, copied the default profile and copied my active files into that directory all to no avail. I have ensured that the profile.ini file is correct, and the emails are still not valid. Thunderbird is 52.3.0. When Thunderbird loads, sometimes it complains about DRAFT folder in my gmail account(s) not being read - but when I try to look at the accounts, no dialogue appears. There are no accounts to "get mail" from; and I cannot see any indication that any of the data has been read. However, there are no error messages indicating the profile is invalid. The email data was working fine on Windows 10 yesterday. Thank you for your help.

All Replies (3)

Toad-Hall
Toad-Hall
  • Top 10 Contributor
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Some links that may assist. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_your_profile_folder_-_Thunderbird http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_from_Windows_to_Linux

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_your_profile_folder Note on moving profiles between operating systems: If you move your profile between dissimilar operating systems (Windows to Mac OS X for example) the path names in the prefs.js file (your settings) may have the wrong syntax.

So I would presume a similar situation may of occurred.

DinghySailor
DinghySailor Question owner
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Thank you for the suggestion. However, as I am using the profile manager to point to the profile, the paths should be correct. Looking at the ini file, they look correct. I remain puzzled!

Zenos
Zenos
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You will need two separate profiles.ini files, one each in the default location in each OS, and formatted appropriately to each OS's naming conventions.

I have used dual booting but have had little interest in trying to share a profile, mainly for historical reasons that I had been using addons with binary components that can't be shared (Enigmail, Lightning). But I have moved and converted a profile from Windows to Linux.

I also found that some addons store pathnames to their resources as absolute pathnames, which of course can't make sense in both OSes. You may be able to work around this if you can re-set these to relative pathnames, and all such resources are stored within the profile folder structure. But this isn't a showstopper, just a nuisance.

Would you care to post here the contents of your two profiles.ini files?

Modified by Zenos