Migrating bookmarks, 32 to 64 bit system

Am 14.01.2023 um 18:03:51 Uhr schrieb bob prohaska:

Can you export them as HTML?

That's what I did.

The problem doesn't seem to be with chrome, it's got something to do with user permissions. The old system came with the default pi user, plus a regular account which I used for the browser.

The new system has only the user account created when first booted. Both user account names are the same, but presumably the user id numbers are different. I thought matching names would be sufficient to let me read the old files from the new host, but apparently not.

If I try to traverse the old filesystem from the new root system using the file manager I see see some files and directories, but quite a few are hidden. In one case I was able to open a graphic, and then got a belated permission denied message that didn't actually do anything.

That suggests something wrong with permissions handling, but whether on the new or old system is unclear.

Thanks for reading and replying!

bob prohaska

Its easy to compare the numeric values associated with user and group names: either look at the file(s) you're transferring worth 'ls -l' or as root use 'less' to read /etc/passwd for both computers (uid and gid are fields 3 and 4).

Once you know uid and gid for both systems, it should be possible to modify the files you're importing to suit the system you're importing them to - providing to can discover the file formats that chrome uses for bookmarks. Don't ask me about that: I don't use the chrome browser,only firefox, brave and lynx, which do everything I need.

bob prohaska wrote on 1/14/23 7:03 PM:

why do you not sync it with google ?

Am 14.01.2023 um 19:55:06 Uhr schrieb bob prohaska:

You can run sudo chown new-user file.

At least part of the trouble is that I didn't recognize the bookmarks display after importing. The old system displayed them individually below the URL bar. The new system displays the imported bookmarks as a folder, below the URL bar and I didn't notice 8-(

It looks as if sudo works very differently between new and old systems. I'm no longer prompted for a password when I use sudo, and when I used sudo to copy the bookmarks file from the old filesystem to the new one the file owner changed (without comment) to root. It appears that change was the cause of my difficulties.

Thanks for writing!

bob prohaska

Two things: PiOS never required typing a password for root. If your old system did, you changed it manually (with visudo). And copying with sudo always chowns to root.

what a stupid question, sorry

Thanks for the clarification!

bob prohaska

sudo cp -p does not chown to root:

see man cp -p same as --preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps

very useful it is, too.

what exactly is stupid with syncing from the 32bit system to google and then syncing the 64bit system from google ? it's bookmarks this thread is about, so why go mess with permissions et al just to move over bookmarks from one chrome to the other ? or was he talking about some de-googled version of _chromium_ ?