Mark's Technomusings

Thoughts, notes, and ramblings on the technology Mark Cervarich deals with on a daily basis.

Moving your Firefox passwords from one profile to another

If you create a new profile in Firefox (or maybe you upgraded from 1.x to 2.0), and you want to copy your saved usernames and passwords from one profile to another, here’s what to do:

  1. Start Firefox (using the profile you want to move passwords to
  2. Tools -> Options… -> Security Tab
  3. Make sure you are willing to lose any existing passwords:

    Click “Show Passwords…” button
  4. Create a master password:

    [x] Use a master password

    Click “OK” Button”
  5. quit out of FF
  6. Copy key3.db and signons.txt from old profile
    Try: C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR_USER_NAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
  7. Start up in the correct profile
  8. Verify passwords are in there via:
  9. Tools -> Options… -> Security Tab

    Click “Show Passwords…” button

    (enter in your master password)

Make your FireFox 2.0 tabs work like they did in Firefox 1.x

I don’t know about all of you, but I HATED the new tab “features” — that included a close button on every tab, and the “tab strip” that appeared if you had too many tabs open. After searching around, I found these changes. When implemented, you should be back to enjoying 1.x style tabs.
Go to “about:config” in your address bar and change “browser.tabs.closeButtons” to whatever tabbing style you like by using the relevant integer values from below.
0 – Display a close button on the active tab only
1 – Display close buttons on all tabs
2 – Don’t display any close buttons
3 – Display a single close button at the end of the tab strip (Firefox 1.x behavior)
Next, change:
browser.tabs.tabClipWidth to 30 (default was 140)
browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 30 (default was 100)
And then I restarted my brower.
The “tab strip” (as it is known), now doesn’t appear until I have more than 24 windows open!

Linux Shell Scripts

Linux shell scripts, Bash scripting, shell programming
Here is a collection of various tools written over the years to ease the administration of Dawid Michalczyk’s systems and help with much webmaster work. They are all Linux shell scripts and need the Bash shell and GNU commands to run (standard on any Linux system). Some, or much, tweaking may be needed to make them work on other Unix systems. Each script has an -h flag for usage explanation. All scripts are released under the GPL license.