Firefox Quantum upgrade lost Profile data

Today, my voidlinux received an upgrade to firefox-esr v52 to v60. I backed up my firefox profile in ~/.mozilla, before starting the new upgraded firefox. In hindsight, this saved my ass.

I noticed firefox upgraded my profile, and certain bits got lost. My major concern was losing all my uMatrix rules. I had this same issue with Gentoo last year when they canned firefox-52.

When asking for help on voidlinux irc, the first response told me to build it myself. That first suggestion had me thinking of going back to gentoo, as my void box is runtime only with no development tools. That led to searching for the pkg build files, and I arrived here.

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/52.0esr/linux-i686/en-GB/

Voila! Problem solved :)

Download the tar file, extract into /tmp. Re/move upgraded firefox profile, and restore ~/.mozilla from backup. Now I could simply run /tmp/firefox/firefox and it loaded up with my old profile. I could successfully export all my bookmarks, rules, and other required data.

Hopefully, this helps someone in similar situation.

shell in colours

Sometimes it feels nice to see a bit of colour. One of the most common places is the shell prompt. The concept and usage is the same, whether you want some colour in your prompt or elsewhere.

nftables base ruleset

I have migrated to nftables. The iptables base ruleset^[1] was incredibly useful, each time I needed to setup from scratch. Following on from that, I wanted to bed down my nftables base ruleset too.

I picked up my iptables base ruleset^[1], and applied the migration techniques from the nftables wiki^[2]

environment

desktop | laptop	phone | tablet
gentoo | debian | devuan arch | void | alpine | openbsd	android v2.x ubuntu? | linux?? | windows???
runit | openrc? busybox tmux lynx elinks i3wm jwm, wpa_gui, volumeicon sylpheed mpv sgt-puzzles qupzilla | firefox	k9 mail Search based launcher Tiny Home Draweroid X-plore QuickPic f-droid Rmaps MapFactor Navigator Train Scout Hanzovy Sachy Puzzles 250+ Solitaire And Bible Lectio Divina Lit Jango Radio Spotify

 

though practical issues have me often irregularly using many others not listed above.

what consists your environment, and why?

gentoo intel-ucode microcode

gentoo provides a package for intel microcode updates to safely update cpu firmwares. this is how i adapted the gentoo way.

suckless st - simple terminal

continuing down the path of simplifying & downsizing.. i have migrated to st^[1] and removed bloatware terminals. i had been using urxvt till now, wasting so much time to configure it. i have no further need for bloatware terminals, particularly when i almost never open up more than one terminal window. for such a small package, st^[1] does everything i need out of the box and more.. suckless rocks!

Cancer in our Communities

Communities can contain cancer cells too!

Just like the cancer cells in human bodies, there can be individuals/cabals cancerous to communities.. online and offline. Some say that cancerous cells are present in all bodies, but remain mutant and repressed in healthy bodies. When the body loses control over cancerous cells, they can take down the entire body, even to it's death. This similarity extends to communities too.

ccze making console life colourful

I discovered ccze a few days ago, while looking for something else. And suddenly my console experience has become more richer and fruitier ;) Like me, if you too (like to) spend more time on the console, and like a little bit of colour, you will love ccze.

gentoo low-power binary-package server

I want to setup a low-power device like the Pi perhaps, to compile and distribute gentoo packages to other computers on the local network at home. Almost all devices are mobile/laptop devices, much more powerful than the Pi, but only online occasionally.

Trying to be All Things to All People

You can't please all the people all the time.

If so, what are the implications, particularly in an open-source world? Trying to please everyone might be a noble ambition. But is that realistic enough and practically achievable? If yes, then all is well! If not, then what..?

Gentoo Portage emerge TMPDIR extending zram btrfs volumes

You can probably see I was heading this way. This post follows a series, and you should read those posts again if you haven't done so recently. This blog post follows my journey through btrfs to gentoo to portage to tmpfs to zram back to btrfs again to finish a circle.

Discovering zram and replacing all tmpfs

I have just discovered zram^[2] :) woohoo... and what a thing that is!

I was so sold on tmpfs, that I used it for everything I possibly could. Since discovering zram, I am using tmpfs for nothing. All my tmpfs needs are met by zram much more efficiently.

gentoo emerge in tmpfs

One of my gentoo pain points has been the extremely (long and) resource intensive emerge for large packages. However, it is expected and many have come up with their own tricks to make this more efficient.

For me, this has been a gradual step-by-step approach, as I encountered these issues and discovered more about Gentoo.

I stated out with my portage configured as default -- compiling everything on the same disk/filesystem mount on my rotating (not ssd) disk. Any emerge affected everything else, which was too invasive to ignore.

I want emerge to run gently in the background, not affecting any foreground tasks.

Devuan releases a candidate.. finally!!?

The Register has just published⁴: "systemd-free Devuan Linux hits version 1.0.0".

My views on systemd still stand. I was hoping to be proved wrong, perhaps in the long-run. But sadly what I see, has only just served to entrench those views.

busybox .config in gentoo

busybox can be configured, just like the kernel :)

Phasing out Arch Linux

ref: Phasing out i686 support

Arch Linux is great at what it does.. always chasing that elusive bleeding edge and providing no other choices to users. I don't want either of that, and I am now phasing out arch from my stacks.

runit openrc gentoo

I decided to have another go at runit, this time on my gentoo.

I had been thinking about this, since I noticed this on

git Gentoo Portage repos on GitHub

git me! The gentoo repos are on github², and I've just discovered them.. mysteriously hidden in the World Wide Web ;)

There is a post on the gentoo forums from 2015, re git/github saying:

Although some developers wrongly still recommend plain rsync-update method, you should never do that, since it is fundamentally insecure (emerge-webrsync is signed by a machine key, but still better). 

You should instead start to sync via git (best do that from github, unless you want to break our infra server).

A Digital Beep

When you don't have a Speaker/Bell, or you can't make quite make it sound, and you want a beep!

gentoo portage

ref: http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/portage

Gentoo is Portage. Portage is Gentoo.

Getting portage settings right is vitally important. It's not the end of the world, if you don't. But you sure will expend a lot of your time staring at the matrix flowing past, as you compile everything yet again one more time..