Firefox Customization for Meilix

Meilix a lightweight operating system can be easily customized. This article talks about the way one must proceed to customize the configuration of Firefox of Meilix or on its own Linux distro and how to copy the configuration file of Firefox directly to the home folder of the user.
Meilix script contains a pref.js file which is responsible for providing the configuration. This file contains various function through which one can edit them according to its need to get the required configuration of its need.

Let’s see an example:

user_pref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=partner-pub-6065445074637525:8941524350");

This line is used to set the browser startup page and it can be edited according to user choice to find the same page whenever he starts his Firefox.

There are several lines too which can be edited to make the required changes.

How does this work?

This is the Mozilla User Preference file and should be placed in the location /home/user_name/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/prefs.js. It actually controls the attributes of Firefox preference and set the command from here to change it.

How to use it?

One can directly go and edit it according to the choice to use it.

How meilix script uses it to change the user preference?

As we can see that .mozilla folder should be under the home directory, therefore we copy the .mozilla to the the skel folder, so that it gets automatically copied to the home location and we would be able to use.
There is also a shell script which comes in handy to implement the browser startup page and the script even copies the configuration file.

1.#!/bin/bash

2.# firefox
3.# http://askubuntu.com/questions/73474/how-to-install-firefox-addon-from-command-line-in-scripts
4.for user_name in `ls /home/`
5.do
  6.preferences_file="`echo /home/$user_name/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/prefs.js`"
  7.if [ -f "$preferences_file" ]
  8.then
    9.echo "user_pref(\"browser.startup.homepage\", \"https://google.com/\");" >> $preferences_file
  10.fi
11.done

This file is taken from here. And it used in Meilix to run the script to set the default startup page in Firefox. This will be taken input from the user end from the Meilix Generator webapp and it will change the line 9 url according to the input given by the user.
On line 3, *.default will set automatically by the script itself, it generated randomly.
After that, the script will copy the prefs.js in its location and it will implement the changes.

Links to follow:

Firefox-preference guide
Firefox-editing-configuration

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Customizing Firefox in Meilix using skel

We had a problem of customizing the Firefox browser configuration using Meilix generator so we used the skel folder in Linux. The /etc/skel directory contains files and directories that are automatically copied over to a new user’s home directory when such user is created by the useradd program.

Firefox generally reads its settings from ~/.mozilla/firefox folder present in Linux home of the user, which is changed when user modifies his settings like changing the homepage or disabling the bookmarks. To add these changes for every new user we can copy these configurations into skel folder.

Which we have done with Meilix which have these configurations in it and can be modified by using Meilix generator.

If you are going to look in your ~/.mozilla/firefox folder you will find a random string followed by .default folder this will contain the default settings of your Firefox browser and this random string is created uniquely for every user. The profile name will be different for all users but should always end with .default so if we use skel the .default will be same for everyone and we may choose any name for that like we have used meilix.default in below script.

For example to change the default homepage URL we can create a script that can be used by Meilix generator to modify the URL in Meilix.

#!/bin/bash

set -eu   	 
# firefox
preferences_file="`echo meilix-default-settings/etc/skel/.mozilla/firefox/meilix.default/user.js`"
if [ -f "$preferences_file" ]
then
	echo "user_pref(\"browser.startup.homepage\", \"${event_url}\");" >> $preferences_file
fi

 

Here the ${event_url} is the environment variable sent by Meilix generator to be added to configuration of Firefox that is added to skel folder in Meilix.

We can similarly edit more configuration by editing the file pref.js file it contains the configuration for Firefox like bookmarks, download location, default URL etc.

Resources

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