Neil Bothwick undergoes nightly builds to ensure he’s up to date.
Q Not so shortcuts
I use Chromium’s search engine shortcuts and have many set up to make searching specific sites quick and easy. Now I have a second laptop and would like to set up the same set of shortcuts on there, but there appears to be no way to export them. I have tried grepping the files in .config/chromium to see which contain my search strings but am having no luck. Is there a relatively easy way of transferring the settings from one computer to another, or am I doomed to having to retype everything?
David Pearce
A Chromium stores settings, history and most other information in an SQLite database in ~/.config/chromium/Default/Web Data. You can manipulate this with the SQLite command-line client but there’s a couple of graphical options that make the job easier. One is DB Browser for SQLite (https://sqlitebrowser. org), but we used SQLite-web (https://github.com/coleifer/sqlite-web) for this. This is a Python program, so if it is not in your distribution’s repositories, you can install it with:
$ pip install sqlite-web
Now open the Web Data file from the old computer with:
$ sqlite-web “Web Data”
This tries to open a web page in your default browser. If this is Chromium, you will get an error, because Chromium will lock its database file. Either set your default browser to something else, or close Chromium as soon as it opens and then open http://127.0.0.1:8080 in another browser. Select the keywords table, press the Export button, pick JSON as the export filetype and SQLite-web will save a file to your Downloads folder. Exit SQLite-web by pressing Ctrl+C in the terminal running it.
Now run it again with Web Data from the new computer. Select the keywords table and press Drop to delete it. Then create a new table called keywords (we do this because there is no option to empty the table without deleting it). Select the keywords table and press Import, pick the file you just exported and then you can exit SQLite-web. Your changes are saved automatically. Finally, restart Chromium and your search engine shortcuts should all be there.
Q Wiping media
I think that it would be very useful to empty the /media/user folder at startup because if an old mounted device folder is still there, it may break some applications that use it. In that case – for example, if the system had a hard reset – this folder (example: NT2) is not deleted and when restarting the system, the same storage device is mounted on a NT21 folder and the application (any) will not recognise the NT2 folder and be broken.