Customizing SLED10 Application Settings

From CoolSolutionsWiki

For some programs you may want to adjust the default settings before any user logs into the machine. Below are the settings that I usually adjust for any networked computer. If you want to adjust any of the default GNOME settings see Locking Down the GNOME Desktop.

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Mozilla Firefox

Beginning with SLED 10 Service Pack 2, default Firefox preferences for all users on the system can be set by editing the file /usr/lib/firefox/local-configuration.js (This file will not be modified by Firefox updates). For example: 

user_pref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://www.google.com/");
user_pref("font.size.fixed.x-western", 14);
user_pref("browser.download.userDownloadDir", false);

Preferences set in this file can be modified by an individual user unless they are locked using the lockPref command. See Locking Down the GNOME Desktop for more information on locking down Firefox on SLED and Mozilla's documentation for more information on locked preferences in general.

To set preferences that apply to all users on versions of SLED 10 prior to Service Pack 2, it is necessary to manually specify the use of this file by adding the following lines to /usr/lib/firefox/greprefs/all.js: 

pref("general.config.filename", "local-configuration.js");
pref("general.config.obscure_value", 0);

Then creating the root-owned, world-readable file /usr/lib/firefox/local-configuration.js for prefererences. Please read Mozilla's documentation for information about the quirks in this file's format.

To change the default preferences or bookmarks of a new user, edit the files /usr/lib/firefox/defaults/profile/prefs.js or /usr/lib/firefox/defaults/profile/bookmarks.html respectively. These files are used as templates when a profile is created for a user who has never launched Firefox and will have no effect on users with existing profiles.

NOTE: On SLED 10 versions before SP2, Firefox updates provided through Online Update will wipe out any customizations to the all.js, prefs.js, or bookmarks.html files described above, requiring custom settings to be recopied to these files.

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OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org's default configuration settings are located in: /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/share/registry/data/org/openoffice/Office/Common.xcu

You can adjust that file to change certain default behavior such as the "theme" OOo uses by default, the default file format, etc.

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profile.local

When you have multiple people accessing network shares, you may want to change the default user behaviour to allow group writes on user's files. To do this edit the /etc/profile.local file to include: 

umask 0002

That way anyone in the same group has write access to any file the user creates. Note that you will want to adjust the permissions on the network home directories to ensure that only the user has access to his directory (for security reasons).

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GNOME's default Applications

You may want to adjust which application is used by GNOME for different files. For instance you may want to adjust MP3 files to be played by Audacious instead of Banshee when a user double clicks on them within Nautilus.

To do this simply edit the /etc/opt/gnome/gnome_defaults.conf file then run the following command: 

SuSEconfig --module gnome-vfs2
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Disabling applications from starting

SLED 10 includes many applications that are launched upon startup, some of which you may not want enabled on networked computers. The location of the startup launchers are in "/etc/xdg/autostart/" and "/opt/gnome/share/autostart/". Browse to these directories to see what is in them.

For instance, if you do not want beagle to run simply delete "/opt/gnome/share/autostart/beagled.desktop" - (note if you want to disable beagle all together also remove "/etc/cron.daily/beagle-crawl-system"). If you are not running on a laptop, but the power management stuff still comes up, delete "/opt/gnome/share/autostart/gnome-power-manager.desktop". And if you do not want your users to automatically apply updates, the autoupdate tasbar utility is launched within the "/etc/xdg/autostart/" directory (just delete it).

You could also put launchers in these directories to have certain programs launch at statup for all users logging into the system.

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Disabling Beagle Search

Beagle is a great search tool and I highly recommend you use it. However, if you run SLED10 on older equipment or have network mounted home directories you may want to disable it to reduce network bandwidth or speed up older computers. Please note that you do not need to remove beagle from your computer, you simply just have to disable it from starting up.

  • rm /opt/gnome/share/autostart/beagled.desktop
  • rm /etc/cron.daily/beagle-crawl-system
  • rpm -e beagle-firefox - This will remove the beagle firefox extension


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