My previous post was about running X applications on my remote (next room) machine. The reason behind that was mostly to offload the memory usage of Firefox and Thunderbird both humming happily near 250M of RAM/each at the moment (slow day).
What did I do to minimize the effort of moving both apps to the remote machine without loosing all the customizations I have made?
Make sure to do the following before running firefox/thunderbird on the remote machine:
# backup the following directories:
laptop $ cd /home/abdallah
laptop $ tar czf .thunderbird.tgz .thunderbird/
laptop $ tar czf .mozilla.tgz .mozilla/
laptop $ scp .thunderbird.tgz server:/home/abdallah
laptop $ scp .mozilla.tgz server:/home/abdallah
After that, connect remotely with -X and run the commands:
laptop $ ssh -X server
server $ tar zxf .mozilla.tgz
server $ tar zxf .thunderbird.tgz
server $ /opt/ff4/firefox -no-remote &
server $ /opt/tb/thunderbird &
Note that -no-remote is important if you ever want to run another local instance of firefox.