copying bookmarks to new MacBook
John Chambers
got a new MacBook Pro, and I'd like to copy the Opera bookmarks over from
my old Mac Powerbook. With the other browsers, I just copied their
directory under Library/Application Support. I did this for
Library/Application\ Support/Opera, downloaded the latest Opera, installed
it, started it up - and it didn't know anything about my bookmarks. It
offers to copy my Safari bookmarks, but of course that's not what I want
it to do.
I've googled the topic, and found lots about copying bookmarks from
Windows systems and copying other browsers' bookmarks to Opera. But I
haven't found anything that copies Opera bookmarks to Opera on a different
machine. So what am I missing.
I did try the Export Opera Bookmarks.. menu, and got two formats, one of
them html. I copied that over to the new machine, told Opera to import
both of them - and nothing showed up in Opera's bookmarks list. Obviously
I'm not doing it right, but I've found no clues what buttons to push to
make it work, if this is possible.
I did find the http://www.opera.com/support/kb/view/475/ page, but all it
says is
Mac OS X:
Go to File > Import bookmarks. Select the bookmark file that you want
to import from.
I've found no clues for how to find a bookmark file that works here. None
of the files under Library/Application\ Support/Opera seem to be bookmark
files, and again selecting one of them as suggested above had no effect.
Also, selecting the two Export Opera Bookmarks.. files had no effect.
There's gotta be a way ...
John Chambers
<Use-Reply-To-Address-Header@[127.1]> wrote:
>
> Paste the below URI, which displays the defined location of the
> "Bookmark" file, into Opera Address Bar:
>
> opera:config#UserPrefs|HotListFileVer2
>
> Copy file from old location to that defined in new.
Thanks; that seems to have worked. It was in a highly unusual place,
in Library/Preferences/Opera\ Preferences/Bookmarks ;-)
Actually, this is unusual. I have a dozen browsers installed on my
old Mac, and Opera is the only one that puts its bookmarks in what
should be an obvious place. All the others put their bookmarks files
in Library/Application\ Support/<browser-name>, for some reason. There
is a Library/Application\ Support/Opera directory, so it was reasonable
to expect that Opera was following the Mac convention.
In any case, I copied the old machine's .../Bookmarks file over the
above file, restarted Opera, and it had the bookmarks.
The main remaining problem was that after I restarted Opera, I wasn't
able to find this forum again and respond. I'd just stumbled across
Opera's implementation of newsgroups, and was unable to retrace my
steps so that I could reply. Is there some documentation somewhere
that I can read that explains it? I'll try to leave this window open
so that I can find replies here; otherwise I may never be able to find
my way back here again. This was typed on my old Mac, and if it works
like the new one, this may be the only message I can submit here. If
this one even works ...
John Chambers
> I do not use the mail/news client in Opera.
I've given up on it, too. ;-) I wasted a *lot* of time trying to
discover how to say "Show me forum X", and totally failed to find
anything other than the "subscribe" window that listed the forums. But
on the side, I installed Thunderbird, which successfully found this
forum in a few seconds, downloaded all the message headers, and showed
me a list of the messages in this group. So maybe I'll stick with TB,
unless I can find some total-n00b documentation on how opera's "forums"
stuff works. I do like to experiment with new tools, but this one has
been such a brick wall that I'll probably just forget it.
> You may want to review messages in the mac group and help at this URI:
> <http://help.opera.com/Mac/9.64/en/mail.html>
I've got that in a (Safari;-) window, and it looks like it has some
useful stuff.
> I've crossposted this message to include the groups
> opera.mac and opera.general
I think I subscribed to both of those via the opera reader, but I
couldn't get it to show them to me. I'll add them in Thunderbird when I
finish typing this, and see what's there.
Now to test whether TB can post to an opera newsgroup (uh, I mean
forum;-) ...
John Chambers
> Now to test whether TB can post to an opera newsgroup (uh, I mean
> forum;-) ...
Yup; that worked. You can probably see from the time stamps that it's
less than a minute later, most of which was spent typing this message.
So Thunderbird works find with the opera forums.
John Chambers
> On Sat, 11 Apr 2009 01:00:12 -0500, Guy
> <Use-Reply-To-Address-Header@[127.1]> wrote:
>> I do not use the mail/news client in Opera.
>>
>> You may want to review messages in the mac group and help at this URI:
>> <http://help.opera.com/Mac/9.64/en/mail.html>
>>
>> I've crossposted this message to include the groups
>> opera.mac and opera.general
>
> I didn't know you could use Xnews on a Mac?
I don't think you can. I didn't know about xnews, so I googled it, and
learned that it's a news reader that runs on a few releases of MS
Windows. No mention of Macs in the articles I looked at.
Anyway, I did solve my problem, after I learned where opera hides its
bookmarks file, which is in a different place on OSX than the bookmarks
files for the other dozen or so browsers that I have on my new MacBook.
(I almost typed "shiny new", but I got the anti-glare screen, and
decided that "shiny" wasn't appropriate. ;-)
In any case, I have also given up trying to understand the opera
newsreader, after wasting too many hours trying to grok its behavior. I
installed Thunderbird, and it works fine with news.opera.com. Actually,
I have a somewhat "too bad" feeling, because opera does so many things
well, and I was expecting that its newsreader would also be good. Maybe
it is, but if I can't figure out how to use it, I suppose I'll never know.
Now to see if I can find a good TB-compatible source of the standard
comp.* and alt.* newsgroups. I'd been getting them from our ISP, but
the ISPs seem to have decided to not bother any more. There seems to be
an idea going around that special newsreaders are obsolete, and everyone
should just use their browsers. But the web-based news sites all have a
separate idiosyncratic interface, sometimes different for every
newsgroup, and it's a real PITA to waste hours or days learning a new
javascript or flash-based GUI that's different for every newsgroup.
Anyway, configuring a new system can be a good way to keep a geek off
the streets for a while. This new Mac is now almost as useful as the
5-year-old one that it replaced, though it still has a long way to go
before it's as easy to use as the ubuntu on my desktop. And the
weirdness with opera's bookmarks was just one of the many challenges in
trying to migrate to a new machine; there are a number of others that I
still haven't solved yet. But they'd be OT here, so I suppose I'll just
sneak away quietly when people are looking the other way ...
Naruki Bigglesworth
Opera has a fairly crappy newsreader, so you aren't missing anything.
Thunderbird is mildly better, but you will soon get sick of it, too.
I don't have any recommendations for Macs, but in the Opera.Linux forum
(What the !@#$%^&* is Opera doing here?) Jens Schuessler recommended
http://www.40tude.com for Windows. I'm using it now and it reminds me
strongly of the old Free Agent reader.
Whiskers pointed me to http://www.newsreaders.com/, so you should check
that for Mac software.