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How to set an icon to start another Firefox profile [solved]

Posted: Thu Jun 02, 2022 4:00 pm
by Feek

Hello,
first of all, I want to thank the Fatdog team for this great distribution :thumbup2: .

I need advice on one little thing:
I use two Firefox profiles with different settings. One is set as default (launching by clicking on an FF icon).
Till now I started the other profile by typing „about:profiles“ into the address bar and clicking on „start the other profile in a new window“ button.

I would like to access the other profile quicker.
So I duplicated firefox.desktop, renamed it to firefox_other.desktop, then opened it with shift+left click and edited (icon line and) exec line to: „firefox-spot --profile /home/spot/.mozilla/firefox/name_of_the_profile.other“.
Firefox will launch after that but I can‘t browse (it can not read any web site).

I tried to edit the exec line to: „firefox --profile /home/spot/.mozilla/firefox/name_of_the_profile.other“, which works well, but the browser runs as root (I can download to /root/downloads).

Is it possible to achieve this goal and run properly as spot?


Re: How to set an icon to start another Firefox profile

Posted: Thu Jun 02, 2022 9:06 pm
by step

My guess is that user root instead of spot owns some of the files in the new profile folder. User spot must own files and folders in /home/spot (don't worry about ownership of symbolic links). Open a terminal window and type

Code: Select all

chown -R spot.spot /home/spot

Then run the browser as spot - not as root otherwise some profile files will end up under root's ownership once again.

To verify that the browser is indeed running as spot you can use Control Panel > System > Htop.

If it still can't work, try to run the whole firefox-spot ... command from a terminal window and review the error messages or post them here; hopefully someone will be able to spot the culprit.


Re: How to set an icon to start another Firefox profile

Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2022 1:51 pm
by Feek

step, thank you for your response.

I think I found the cause:

As the name of another Firefox profile, I used the word in my native language ("růžový"), which contains the problematic letters of "ů", "ž", and "ý" (I originally mentioned only to illustrate the imaginary name "other" and I had no idea that It can have influence on something). As I described in the first post, I can easily enter "about:profiles" into the default profile's address bar and run another profile in the new window (with the name "růžový") without a problem. It runs as spot (verified in htop).

However, when entering the „firefox-spot --profile /home/spot/.mozilla/firefox/name_of_the_profile.růžový“ in terminal there is a problem, as I described above.

So I created the third profile called "ruzovy" in Firefox (without the problematic letters), then edited the profile name in the command and now everything works. It runs as spot, so everything is fine now.


Re: How to set an icon to start another Firefox profile [solved]

Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2022 7:02 pm
by step

Feek, I'm glad you sorted it out and can run firefox with a second profile. Regardless, make sure that spot owns the files in /home/spot or you could run into different issues in the future.


Re: How to set an icon to start another Firefox profile

Posted: Sat Jun 04, 2022 12:45 pm
by Feek

Then run the browser as spot - not as root otherwise some profile files will end up under root's ownership once again.

Regardless, make sure that spot owns the files in /home/spot or you could run into different issues in the future.

step, thanks for the recommendation.
You're probably right. In the last saved session I tried to launch Firefox as root to check if the newly created .desktop file works.
It seems to me that the best solution will be to delete the last multi sfs and create a new one with the correct settings regarding the other profile.
I'm sure I didn't launch Firefox as root in the previous multi sfs's, so it should be ok.