[Techtalk] moving .mozilla to external drive

[freepalestin at dslextreme.com]

Magni Onsoien
> On 2008-04-23 19:50:30 -0700, freepalestin at dslextreme.com said:
>> I use Seamonkey to read my email.
>>
>> Is there a way to move .mozilla to an external drive and have access to
>> my
>> email on the external drive?
>>
>> I tried using mv and setting a symlink. That did not work. I tried
>> having the .mozilla in my home directory and setting symlinks
>> in the different account directories under the Mail directory. That
>> didn't
>> work either.
>>
>> I don't understand why this won't work. I'm not even queried for my
>> passwords for my email accounts when I start mail under seamonkey.
>
> Exactly how did you make the link? What does it point to (ls -l
> $HOME/.mozilla)?
>
> I have my .mozilla on a local disk in stead of on the NFS share (to
> minimize
> the risk of some other user on the NFS share getting access to it), and it
> works like a charm.
>
> magnio at auchentoshan:~$ ls -ld $HOME/.mozilla
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 magnio ansatt 40 2008-02-18 11:50 /home/ica/magnio/.mozilla
> -> /home/auchentoshan/magnio/mozilla-config/
>
> Remember that the paths in the config file may be wrong if you don't
> have the same file structure on all machines. You can use 'strace -e
> open seamonkey' to get a (long) list of the files Mozilla is trying to
> access during startup, and if it can't find the config files you will
> get lots of "No such file or directory".
>
>
> Magni :)

Thank you for the tip of running strace!

I want to put .mozilla on an external drive and .mozilla will not be in or
under my home directory.

Seamonkey wants .mozilla in my home directory. When I moved the .mozilla
to the external drive and set a symlink
cd $HOME
ln -s /new/path/on/external/drive/to/.mozilla

When I tried to access my email, I was not even queried for my passwords
for myInbox.sbd email accounts. I could not access any of my email.

I then tried creating a .mozilla directory in my home directory and
copying some of the files from the external drive and setting symlinks
from Inbox.sbd from the email accounts to the .mozilla in my home
directory. That did not work either.

Maybe there is no way to put .mozilla on an external drive and have my
email accumulate there.

Darlene Wallach