SUSE Studio - Customising the Browser

For OpenAustralia DevLive, I wanted the browser to open straight into the local machine's development instance of the web application. I also wanted to provide a bunch of project related links as bookmarks to make it easy for users to get help or submit bugs.

To change the browser start page you need to add an overlay file called browserconfig.properties in the /usr/lib/firefox directory (/usr/lib64/firefox with 64 bit Firefox), with the following contents:

browser.startup.homepage=http://dev.openaustralia.org/
browser.startup.homepage_reset=http://dev.openaustralia.org/

To customise the default bookmarks, export a bookmarks.html file from Firefox and upload it as an overlay in the /usr/lib/firefox/defaults/profile directory.

Both these files normally have the permissions root:root 644.

Comments

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Aug 10, 2009 by henare

It occured to me that if the Firefox package was updated on a deployed appliance, newly created users would get the default openSUSE start page. I guess the lesson here is that the ‘correct’ way would be to create a custom package and build that into the appliance.