I multiboot XP and some Linuxes, how can I share Firfox, TBird, Picase among all ?

[brjoon1021]

Hi,

I want to make my life easier and have Firefox, Thunderbird, and Picasa (a google picture editing and organizing application) shared between all of the OS's: Win XP, PCLOS, Linux Mint, maybe another Linux.

This article peeked my interest: http://www.thinkdigit.com/index.php?...le&prodid=1118
-It is about sharing FF and TBird between Windows and Linux.

I have some questions about the mechanics of doing this.

1. I assume that I install the respective versions of FF, TBird and Picasa in each OS.

2. FAT32 seems to be the most OS friendly filesystem. So, I believe that the data for each of these applications must be put in a separate FAT32 partition as the article above describes.

3. Are there any tips, tricks or caveats that you would have concerning doing this ?

4. Do you think that Google Picasa could be shared the same way ? I already have a large FAT32 storage partition where I save all pictures, files, music, videos etc... so that Windows and Linuxes can access them.

I am not too experienced with Linux. This is probably the most difficult thing that I have tried to do, so any tips or warnings would be appreciated. I am especially wondering if anything will go awry when windows or one of the Linuxes updates its FF, Tbird or Picasa to a new version. Will that hose anything up ?

Thanks,
B.

[nabetse]

Your link pointed to the homepage so I'm not sure what article you were referring to.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you want to share config settings for each those programs. Just out of curiosity, why do you want to do this?

I'm just guessing that you'd have to get the linux counterparts of those programs to use the config files from the windows installations. I'm not familiar with the methodology myself but you could try reading the documentation to see if there are options to customize config directories.

If you want to share the same installation, you'd probably have to install under windows and use an emulator or something like wine (http://www.winehq.org/) to run it in linux. But, that would be a lot of work.

I'm running both a windows and linux installation of firefox and have no problems with either. I'm guessing the same would be for thunderbird.

From what I understand, Picassa maintains a database of images that it is aware of. You can share the images without any problem as long as linux and windows can both access them. You'd just have to make both Picassas aware of the same images.

I'm guessing again that you can get picassa under different linux distributions to share the same database file (or directory) but I've never done that myself. It sounds like it would be a lot easier to install those programs and use them. There isn't really much to synchronize between firefox and thunderbird (unless you are talking about some heavy modifications). For picassa, if you keep your image files organized, it shouldn't be hard to keep both picassas happy.

HTH