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Importing emails from Mac Mail into Evolution

Inside Mac Mail, right click on your mailboxes and select 'Archive mailbox'. This will create an .mbox of your mailbox. Do this for each mailbox you have set up in Mac Mail.

Then create a folder called 'mail' in your home directory in Ubuntu, and copy these .mbox folders in to it.

Then launch Evolution and select File > Import > Import data and settings from older programs

Evolution will find the .mbox folders in your newly created 'mail' folder and import them all for you automatically.

Sharing bookmarks between Firefox in Ubuntu and Firefox in OSX

Assuming you are dual booting OSX and Ubuntu, with read/write access from Ubuntu in to your OSX partition, here is a method to share the same bookmarks.

In Firefox 3, bookmarks are stored in your profile folder, in a file called spaces.sqlite. We are going to delete the spaces.sqlite in your Ubuntu Firefox profile and create a symlink to the same file in your OSX partition.

Make sure to close Firefox and backup your spaces.sqlite files first.

The command should be something like this:

ln -s /media/mac/Users/john/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/uuuvglig.default/spaces.sqlite
/home/john/.mozilla/firefox/cqzxegul.default/spaces.sqlite

in other words:

ln -s /path/to/real/file /path/to/non-existent/file

This will create a soft symbolic link in your Ubuntu Firefox profile folder.

Clearing the msftres flag set by gparted

If you have used the partition editor on the Ubuntu LiveCD to create a FAT32 partition, you may notice that this new partition will be flagged with msftres. This means it is MS Reserved and you will not be able to mount this partition easily or at all in OS X.

Here is a simple workaround to get rid of the msftres flag:

(These instructions assume that you have already created a FAT32 partition using gparted)

1. Using the Ubuntu LiveCD launch the partition editor and delete the FAT32 partition.
2. Create a resierFS partition in its place

Why do we do this?

• gparted sets no flags on reiserFS partitions it creates
• the Disk Utility (which we will need in the next step) in OS X can't edit ext2/3 partitions, neither can it erase a FAT16, FAT32 or NTFS partition that is flagged with MS Reserved (i.e. msftres)

Now we continue with the instructions:

1. Next launch OSX and open Disk Utility
2. Now click on the resierFS partition and select 'erase'
3. Erase the reiserFS partition and replace it with a FAT32 partition (choose the FAT from the drop down menu)
4. Disk Utility will create a FAT32 partition without any flags and this new partition will mount nicely in both OSX and Ubuntu