September 2023 - main

Transferring settings and data from Firefox and Thunderbird
by Bev Nicolson 02 Nov '23

02 Nov '23

It looks like I will be getting another laptop as my old one is reaching the end of the road. I want to be certain about what I'll be doing, hence asking. What I want to do is transfer all the bookmarks (I have *a lot*), passwords and settings for Firefox over. Is creating a profile the easiest way of doing that? I also want to ensure I have the folders of old emails saved in Thunderbird somewhere safe. Those are emails I have stored on the laptop, not online. Transferring Thunderbird's settings would be a bonus too. If I create a Thunderbird profile, will it do both of those things? Bev.

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Re: Weird freezes in Firefox
by Phil Ashby 11 Sep '23

11 Sep '23

On 11/09/2023 12:00, Peter<peter.northerly(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > Any ideas what this could be? Its happened a couple of times. > > I will be doing something perfectly ordinary in Firefox, like > shopping on Amazon was the last one. All of a sudden the mouse > cursor, as I move the mouse, turns into a broad black stream, which > makes a trail a half inch or so wide, quite jagged. Stays in place as > the mouse is moved on. In and out of the browser window. Its > impossible to close the window. More clicking brings up partial > truncated small windows. Right clicks have no effect. That sounds like the display output is frozen apart from a hardware mouse cursor. You should (hopefully) have something in an Xorg.log file (after a restart!) to help identify if the X server itself has died, or if Firefox has exclusively grabbed the screen then hung. As this only occurs with Firefox, then my hunch would be the latter. > The only thing I could find to do to get out of it was reboot. You could try Ctrl-Alt-Backspace (the default X server terminate 3-key-salute). If it's Firefox that has a problem you may get your login screen back. I have also used the magic SysReq keys (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key) to sync disk blocks then reboot which might get you more useful log file contents... > This is Debian 11, fluxbox, using the Nvidia drivers for their card. > Never happened with any other app, including not with any other > browser. Doesn't happen often, maybe three or four times over > several months. Another thing to try then: the nouveau drivers, although you will likely lose some performance depending on your particular card. > I shall be upgrading to Debian 12 fairly soon, so maybe that will > make it go away. But what could it be? And what would you do, other > than upgrading? I made the switch to 12 (bookworm) a couple of months back - all ok so far running sway atop Wayland with or without Xwayland support for older X11 apps (apart from Java, but that's another story entirely*) Good luck! Phil. * https://www.ashbysoft.com/articles/swingland/

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Weird freezes in Firefox
by Peter 11 Sep '23

11 Sep '23

Any ideas what this could be? Its happened a couple of times. I will be doing something perfectly ordinary in Firefox, like shopping on Amazon was the last one. All of a sudden the mouse cursor, as I move the mouse, turns into a broad black stream, which makes a trail a half inch or so wide, quite jagged. Stays in place as the mouse is moved on. In and out of the browser window. Its impossible to close the window. More clicking brings up partial truncated small windows. Right clicks have no effect. The only thing I could find to do to get out of it was reboot. This is Debian 11, fluxbox, using the Nvidia drivers for their card. Never happened with any other app, including not with any other browser. Doesn't happen often, maybe three or four times over several months. I shall be upgrading to Debian 12 fairly soon, so maybe that will make it go away. But what could it be? And what would you do, other than upgrading? Peter

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