While I highly encourage people to just give Ubuntu a go, I appreciate there may be applications (games, Photoshop) that just don’t work good enough on Linux without lot of effort.
When I started dual booting Linux and Windows a few years ago, one of the first things I wanted to do, was to link a ton of Linux folders to my Windows partitions. Fortunately, read/write support for NTFS drives was already relatively stable back then, so I edited /etc/fstab to mount my NTFS partitions on boot and linked relevant directories in my home directory to their NTFS counterparts. Doesn’t require much effort at all, yet it thoroughly lowers the barrier of true dual booting — I might even explain this process in a future blog.
Another issue I encountered was my Firefox profile, which was constantly out of sync with my Windows profile. As the saying goes, simple solutions are often the best, so I looked into bridging it, too. Now, a relatively dirty solution would be to just link both folders via the ln -s command, but Firefox has a much neater feature built into it: the Firefox Profile Manager. How can this be used to link profiles? I’ll guide you through it below.
1. Open up a terminal and run the firefox -profilemanager command.
2. Click the ‘create profile’ button.
3. Click ‘Next’, after (not?) reading the introduction text someone jotted down.
4. Enter a profile name and click the ‘Choose folder’ button.
5. Look up your main Firefox profile on your Windows partition. These are typically stored in folders like C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\%profilename% (2000, XP) or C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\%profilename% (Vista, 7).
6. Click ‘Finish’ to link the profile.
7. Select the profile you just created and hit ‘Start Firefox’ to start using it.
That wasn’t so hard, was it? Enjoy your linked profiles!