[sf-lug] Upgrading from Gutsy to Intrepid

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Christian Einfeldt (einfeldt at gmail.com):

> I am going to be helping an elderly guy upgrade from Gutsy to Intrepid.  He
> probably uses Firefox to save his bookmarks, as opposed to cloud bookmarks
> like Google bookmarks, so I will need to save the data in at least his
> Firefox config files.  Does anyone have any warnings of traps for the unwary
> in moving from Gutsy to Intrepid?

Firefox's bookmarks file has a (very) stable-over-time data format,
fortunately.  You'll find it as ~/.mozilla/firefox/[random
string]/bookmarks.html .  [random string] is generated at the time
Firefox creates the user profile.  It's a kind of trivial security hack.

The rest of the Firefox user config seems to be stored in a series of
sqlite files in the same directory.  I figure that'll probably upgrade
cleanly from Firefox 2.x to 3.0.x, but am less certain than with the
bookmarks file.

Firefox extensions you might consider adding for _some_ Firefox
installations (but you decide whether they're right for your friend):
User Agent Switcher, BugMeNot, Firebug, and NoScript, as mentioned here:
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/index.php?page=kicking#linuxbrowser
(Page has hyperlinks for each item cited.)

Well, not so much Firebug except for people who debug pages and/or
sites, but the rest have broad appeal.

Just to stress, despite the name, NoScript _does_ permit you to run
Javascript/Flash/etc., but just lets _you_ decide where and when.