How To: Dual boot and use only one Mozilla Thunderbird inbox

Ok, so I have been dual booting Windows XP and Ubuntu for some time now, as many of you already know. I have also been using Mozilla Thunderbird now for a few years as well on both platforms. However, until today, the idea of merging both installations of Thunderbird into one unified profile had not crossed my mind. But today I was reading around on the web and noticed someone asking about it, so I thought I would see if I could figure out how to set up Thuderbird in Ubuntu so that it would share the same profile as my Thunderbird installation in Windows, that way I wouldn't have to worry about keeping both inboxes syncronized and having duplicates of all my emails in two separate places. The following will be the instructions you need to setup your Ubuntu Thunderbird installation to use your Windows XP Thunderbird installation's profile. (These instructions are assuming that you have already started up Thunderbird at least one time so that it has generated a profile directory and a profile.ini file.)

First thing you need to do is open up a terminal, then copy and paste this, editing where necessary:

cd /home/Your_home_dir/mozilla-thunderbird && mv xxxxxxx.default xxxxxxx.default.bak && ln -s /location_of_windows_partition/"Documents and Settings/your_windows_username/Application Data"/Thunderbird/Profiles/xxxxxxx.default ~/.mozilla-thunderbird/xxxxxxx.default (where xxxxxxx is the name of the profile directory and you need to change anything that is italicized to fit your configuration)

Once you have done that, all you need to do is open up Thunderbird and you should see immediately that you have all the messages and contacts and EVERYTHING from your windows installation of Thunderbird on your Ubuntu installation, easy right!?