For a long time we installed the mozilla and firefox (etc) downloaded from 
mozilla.org.  At one point the Vendor ones were rather out-of-date (this 
dates back to when we were using RH8 etc), so we just ignored them.  I've 
been meaning to re-visit this for the last year or so (because the non-rpm 
install is a bit tedious to automate).

I finally (because of the recent mozilla/ffox security update), took a 
look at using the rpm versions included with SL.

We had a fairly complex install setup to override a bunch of default 
preferences etc, add plugins etc.  Doing the same for mozilla from the rpm 
version worked much as I'd have expected, though it took me a while to 
realise that the chrome/installed-chrome.txt is _ignored_ 'cos 
mozilla-rebuild-databases.pl reconstruct it from the chrome/lang/ files, 
which I wasn't expecteing. That made adding the calendar xpi a little bit 
harder but I think I eventually got there...

For firefox I've run into a few more issues which I've been beating my 
head over most of today:

   by default the rpm version doesn't consult the browserconfig.properties
   file for the default startup page, though adding a file under
   .../defaults/prefs/ (all-damtp.js in my case) containing:

    pref("browser.startup.homepage", "resource:/browserconfig.properties");
    pref("browser.startup.homepage_reset", "resource:/browserconfig.properties");

   seems to restore the behaviour.  In the mozilla.org builds those lines
   are in firefox.js -- is there a reason to remove them or is that just
   how the rpm version gets built?


   I *can't* get the calendar xpi to install at all, even if I give up
   and run the stupid installer as root:

    firefox -install-global-extension   .../calendar_linux_20050111.xpi

   the extension will show up in the extensions-manager but I don't get it
   listed as a tool (as it does when a user installs it).  Of course after
   a few days I gave up trying with the other firefox too so maybe this
   just doesnt ever work...


   I can't work out how to set the default set of languages (as shown in
   edit/Preferences/General/Languages), to include en_GB and en_US (and
   maybe some others).  By setting LANG in a wrapper calling firefox I can
   get one default locale/language but a user can specify an ordered list
   so why can't I specify a default list centrally?

Hmm, I see that our previous installs only supported a very small set of 
languages (en_GB basially), so we probably never had to think about this 
before...

I still need to look at thunderbird but that one isn't so urgent anyway, 
and looks like I'll need less tweaking since we never did much for it 
anyway!

Has anyone else already found ways round these things?  Google shows very 
little which appears to be relevant...

-- 
Jon Peatfield,  Computer Officer,  DAMTP,  University of Cambridge
Mail:  [log in to unmask]     Web:  http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/