Re: OT: Old Mozilla to new Thunderbird, how to get emails over?

On a sunny day (Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:57:00 -0800) it happened Joerg
<invalid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in <7pfp2iFoh1U1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:15:03 -0800) it happened Joerg
<invalid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in <7pfj3dFp0uU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

It's often also the software that's clunky. Thunderbird seems to require
users to be logged in as administrator or it may say "cannot write email
to file". Just had that happen. For some reason Microsoft does that
right, never happened with any of their programs (so far).

<shaking head>

And all that from somebody who insists on a manual gear in a car.
Why do you not simply change the permissions so it can write to that directory?

You just have no clue about how Unix works.


Windows ain't Unix :-)


Get a good book.


A have a few good Westerns ...

I used to record some westerns, John Wayne stuff, like that, maybe still have some on disk.
At some point, except for some real pieces of art, you have seen it all.
And justification of genocide on does not jive with me anymore.
But then, may the strongest one win, it is nature.
That brings me to Unix over (not versus) Microsoft crap.
They, MS, did not start out so bad, bought some CP/M clone like operating system, and named it MS DOS,
got IBM to sell it with their PCs.
That basically killed CP/M (CP/M was actually better then MS DOS in some way, more flexible).
PCs were too small for something bigger.
Then they added a GUI, win 3.1 on top of MS DOS.
But they got competition from DR DOS (digital research), I ran win 3.1 on top of DR DOS for example.
DR DOS was far better then MS DOS, and had a nice user interface.
So they then had to make it so 'MS Windows' could no longer run on the competition,
so they basically build some of MS DOS into the GUI system, so no longer a separate MS DOS.
If you realize that DOS stands for 'disk operating system', and that they integrated that
into a GUI, and a GUI is basically an *application*, then you would see that that was already the first sign
of a ever more complex labyrinth of interconnected stuff without a clear structure or philosophy.
So that crap was win 95.
It had all the problem of MS DOS, and all the problems of a bad GUI, combined together.
Of course the code could no longer be improved, spaghetti knots and 16 bit old dos routines
what not, mixed together, so from then on they needed to mix a new formula all the time,
win98, win 2000, win xp, vista, win 7, few more I forgot about, all with feature limited sub-versions.
The other side was Unix.
Unix, I fist worked with it in 1979, so 30 years ago, took a big flight once Linux brought out a simple clone of it.
It has a sane structure, the OS is separated from the applications and GUI, nice and clean interface,
and no real limitations, source code available, portable to almost any platform.
I see people here talking about Linux and 'folders'.
It makes me look up to the sky and say help.
Note that the GUI on top of kernel, the OS, is Xwindows, and the 'folders' is just whatever way the *APPLICATION*
running on Xwindows wants to show you the directory structure, there are a zillion 'window managers' and 'file managers' in 'Linux'.
The name Linux is often used for the whole collection of stuff, but that is just a choice by the people who distributed
your version of 'Linux', the kernel is what is at the basis of it all, and the only part that Linus actually
is involved in as far as I know, the 'kernel' is what you could perhaps call the 'basic operating system', with
a lot of drivers for the hardware, it is the interface to the hardware, and provides services to all the stuff running on it.


My recommendation is REALLY that you read a decent book (although I am against books in this electronic age,
but then if you only have Adobe reader on a MS platform maybe a book is faster), and read up on the basic Unix system.
How it is controlled by a shell.
Read about bash, and it's command syntax.
Read that book, like I did read that book almost 30 years ago....
Nothing has changed! It is not like a new commercial version every few years like MS spits out,
and the poor ignorant sheep buy, and buy and buy, ripped of a hundred dollar or more at the time
for a 20 cent DVD copy! That slows their system even more every time, forces them to buy more hardware every time,
NO! Unix, the study of it, is a true lifetime investment.
Anyways, the procedure is this :
Become root (log in as root), start an root xterm in some 'Linux' versions, if
/this/is/the/directory/in/question_here_the_stuff_is
Look up the user name you want to have access to the stuff in that directory.
Type in the xterm:
chown username:users /this/is/the/directory/in/question_here_the_stuff_is
where 'users' is the group, if any, that username belongs to, type:
man chown
You can have a look in /etc/passwd to see what usernames and groups there are, and what belongs to what.

Or, if that still gives problems, change permissions in the whole chain recursively:
chown -R username:users /this/is/the/directory/in/question_here_the_stuff_is
And, if you are a weakling, log out as root, and become an impotent user.

Copyright (c) Jan Panteltje 2009-always All Rights Reserved.
.

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