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Sharing Opera workspace between Linux and Mac OS X
Hello.I've recently moved to Opera and I'm very happy with it. It currently manages my email, contacts, bookmarks, rss feeds and passwords. I primarily work with Ubuntu, but sometimes I reboot my laptop with Mac OS X and work with it for several hours. I'd like to be able to use Opera as well and I just approached the problem by rsyncing the Opera workspace files between the two operating systems (by using an intermediate NAS: that is, I first rsync from Ubuntu to the NAS, the reboot to Mac OS X, and rsync from the NAS to Mac OS X). But when I run Opera from Mac OS X, it seems that email and rss are fine; contacts, bookmarks and passwords are empty. Can you help to solve this?
Thanks.
PS I know I can remotely sync my stuff with Opera Link, but I prefer to keep my files only on my computers.
26. October 2011, 05:39:59 (edited)
Yes! We can do that.Difficulty level: Power ninja.
Launch Opera once with te command "/Applications/Opera.app/Contents/MacOS/Opera -csp". This will put all your profile data in ~/.operaprofile which should match the ~/.opera directory on Linux. rsyncing should work much better when the folder structure is the same. You only need to run this command once to create the directory.
Exclude these files when copying data across to speed things up (the data is recreated on demand). Files and folders are relative to the Opera profile path:
application_cache/
cache/
opcache/
mail/lexicon/
tasks.xml
PS: You should not use Opera Link to synchronize your data in this setup. I’m not saying planes would fall out of the sky, but your bookmarks certainly could drop out of the cloud!
Alternately, you could setup a shared folder between the two systems. Place a operaprefs.ini file in the default Opera directory location on both systems that points to the shared directory using this setting: opera:config#UserPrefs|OperaDirectory Under no circumstance should the two systems run at the same time using the shared folder. That is much closer to planes-dropping-from-the-sky (or at least browsers crashing) conditions.
In Opera 12 you can use the -pd option when starting Opera to an absolute path to the Opera directory instead of using the operaprefs.ini option described above. This must be done on every launch.
Good luck with your quest!
It works perfectly. Thanks. And definitely not hard to do.
PS Yes, I could share the same partition and it would be better, but so far I wasn't able to find a file system that can be mounted r/w both from Linux and Mac OS X and it's reliable (this excludes vfat).
PS Yes, I could share the same partition and it would be better, but so far I wasn't able to find a file system that can be mounted r/w both from Linux and Mac OS X and it's reliable (this excludes vfat).
Hi, did you try ExFat (I'm not sure it's yet supported by ubuntu) or NTFS (with NTFS-3G, Tuxera NTFS or SL NTFS on Mac) ?
« L’homme raisonnable s’adapte au monde ; l’homme déraisonnable s’obstine à essayer d’adapter le monde à lui-même. Tout progrès dépend donc de l’homme déraisonnable. » [George Bernard Shaw]
The problem with non U*ix filesystems is that they don't support symbolic links, at least in a compatible mode (I mean, you can't symlink when mounting NTFS from Linux / Mac OS X; *Fat doesn't support symlinks at all). I didn't check, maybe this is not a problem with Opera as it perhaps doesn't use symlinks. But it's a problem of sharing generic contents.
I tried ExFat after your suggestion: Mac OS X can natively format a partition in ExFat and there's a FUSE module for Linux (even though it's out of the official package repo). Not very convinced about it: rsync gives many warnings, can't do chown, for instance. chown is not a problem (you can mount the partition in single-user mode), but I see also many mkstemp failing, I've to check whether there's a serious consequence of it or it's just a warning. In any case, the partition got unmountable from Linux after a couple of reboots, so perhaps the support is not stable enough.
I could give NTFS a try, not using it as a stable working area, but as an intermediate buffer for rsync, so I would at least avoid the need of an external network disk to do the job, as I need today.
But probably the best solution is to be able to mount read only the "foreign" partition. Linux can mount HFS+ read only (so I can use it for a rsync source), there's a EXT2 support from Mac OS X, I have to check whether it's stable enough in ro mode.
Thanks.
I tried ExFat after your suggestion: Mac OS X can natively format a partition in ExFat and there's a FUSE module for Linux (even though it's out of the official package repo). Not very convinced about it: rsync gives many warnings, can't do chown, for instance. chown is not a problem (you can mount the partition in single-user mode), but I see also many mkstemp failing, I've to check whether there's a serious consequence of it or it's just a warning. In any case, the partition got unmountable from Linux after a couple of reboots, so perhaps the support is not stable enough.
I could give NTFS a try, not using it as a stable working area, but as an intermediate buffer for rsync, so I would at least avoid the need of an external network disk to do the job, as I need today.
But probably the best solution is to be able to mount read only the "foreign" partition. Linux can mount HFS+ read only (so I can use it for a rsync source), there's a EXT2 support from Mac OS X, I have to check whether it's stable enough in ro mode.
Thanks.
27. October 2011, 07:36:20 (edited)
Originally posted by fabriziogiudici:
The problem with non U*ix filesystems is that they don't support symbolic links, at least in a compatible mode (I mean, you can't symlink when mounting NTFS from Linux / Mac OS X; *Fat doesn't support symlinks at all). I didn't check, maybe this is not a problem with Opera as it perhaps doesn't use symlinks. But it's a problem of sharing generic contents.
Symlinks are support natively on Mac, but they are hidden (Mac OS is based on Darwin...). There is some alternative services to enable symlink on Mac OS X :
-> http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/10433/symboliclinker
-> http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/13001/make-symlink
-> http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/9726/alias-to-symlink
There is also NFS, natively support by both, but I'm not sure that is a solution for you
« L’homme raisonnable s’adapte au monde ; l’homme déraisonnable s’obstine à essayer d’adapter le monde à lui-même. Tout progrès dépend donc de l’homme déraisonnable. » [George Bernard Shaw]
Ten days ago I experienced a disk failure, but I didn't lose data, since everything was backed up. I've now installed a replacement disk and took the opportunity of doing some improvement, moving data in different partitions. Strangely enough, Opera doesn't see again automatically my setup (that is, it starts but it doesn't see things, such as contacts, bookmarks, passwords, etc... all the things that I had originally problem with). I have to run it every time with an explicit '-cps' argument. Not a big deal: I renamed the executable from Opera to Opera.bin and replaced the original Opera with this script:
#!/bin/sh
`dirname $0`/Opera.bin -csp
which does the work. I'd only like to know what's possibly happening.
#!/bin/sh
`dirname $0`/Opera.bin -csp
which does the work. I'd only like to know what's possibly happening.