Lock Down Firefox Preferences on Ubuntu Lucid With a New firefox.js File

In the past couple of weeks we've received 105 donated computers. Dell GX260/270 towers, P4's all, 512MB-1GB of RAM and decent specs otherwise. This has dramatically shifted my vision for the technology infrastructure of the Academies. We no longer have to worry about utilizing underpowered Pentium 3 machines any longer, which means the need for LTSP and all its advantages is gone as well.

LTSP is, in my opinion, an elegant but troublesome solution. Without consistent and frequent monitoring there are simply too many ways for individual workstations to stop functioning. Of course, when a breaker flips, a student accidentally kicks a surge protector strip off, or someone knocks out the switch the whole thing comes to a crashing halt.

Therefore, I've recently begun building several images of both Windows XP (for our Rosetta Stone utilizing teachers) and Ubuntu Lucid for the various machines we have on campus. I'm hoping to find the time to put together a complete "From Square One" guide to locking down the Ubuntu desktop (as I've done it a few times already this week), but for now I thought I'd share a particularly useful bit of code, following up from a previous post of mine.

Some of the old firefox.js settings no longer work, but I've managed to fix all of them and add a couple more that I like. I think the descriptions are mostly adequate to see what I'm attempting, but if you have any questions drop a comment and I'll reply. Cheers! -Joe

As before, this is the firefox.js file located in etc/firefox/pref/

// This is the Debian specific preferences file for Mozilla Firefox
// You can make any change in here, it is the purpose of this file.
// You can, with this file and all files present in the
// /etc/firefox/pref directory, override any preference that is
// present in /usr/lib/firefox/defaults/pref directory.
// While your changes will be kept on upgrade if you modify files in
// /etc/firefox/pref, please note that they won't be kept if you
// do them in /usr/lib/firefox/defaults/pref.

pref("extensions.update.enabled", true);

// Use LANG environment variable to choose locale
pref("intl.locale.matchOS", true);

// Disable default browser checking.
pref("browser.shell.checkDefaultBrowser", false);

// Prevent EULA dialog to popup on first run
pref("browser.EULA.override", true);

// identify default locale to use if no /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/LOCALE
// exists for the current used LOCALE
pref("distribution.searchplugins.defaultLocale", "en-US");

// Enable the NetworkManager integration
pref("toolkit.networkmanager.disable", false);

// Other preferences

user_pref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://www.aeacs.org");

user_pref("startup.homepage_override_url", "http://www.aeacs.org");

user_pref("startup.homepage_welcome_url", "http://www.aeacs.org");

pref("browser.startup.homepage_reset", "http://www.aeacs.org");

pref("privacy.sanitize.sanitizeOnShutdown", true);

pref("privacy.sanitize.promptOnSanitize", false);

pref("privacy.clearOnShutdown.offlineApps", true);

pref("privacy.clearOnShutdown.passwords", true);

pref("privacy.clearOnShutdown.siteSettings", true);

pref("privacy.clearOnShutdown.history", false);

pref("privacy.clearOnShutdown.downloads", false);

pref("signon.rememberSignons", false);

pref("browser.tabs.warnOnClose", false);

LTSP Local Apps progress: Firefox AND Flash Success!

Yesterday (Saturday) the schools campus was open until 4pm to give teachers one last shot at preparing for the kids' arrival on Monday. At about 3:50 I finally got my classroom LTSP server running Firefox with Flash as a local app!

It took a few clean installs to get it working and I never could get it to work with XFCE, which may be just as well since their support listserv still hasn't gotten back to me about kiosk mode in XFCE 4.6 and there is still no documentation on their website for 4.6 at all.

In the end I used GNOME, but I was also successful using KDE on one of the computer lab servers a couple of days ago. I plan on sticking with GNOME for the time being mostly because it is a faster desktop environment, but also because kiosktool for KDE appears to be a pain to install AND rarely maintained. I just wasn't willing to muddle my way through another lockdown program so it looks like GConf will be my new best friend for the time being.

I took the time to create a new page on the wiki that describes for beginners the process to getting Firefox and flash working as a local app on an LTSP setup. I haven't run through it myself to make sure every line is accurate, but I plan on doing so this week when I switch the computer lab over to GNOME from KDE.

In summary: it should now be possible for nearly anyone to install an LTSP setup with nothing more than a Pentium 4 as a server and then run Firefox with flash as a local application on the thin clients without too much trouble. LTSP is getting more viable by the day! -joe

Back (again), Jaunty Jackalope, LTSP local apps, and a new way to set firefox preferences

Well it has been way too long since I posted an actual post here. Last year I had a lot to say as the Technology Teacher and School Techguy. Unfortunately the budget cuts to California's school system led to the outright elimination of my position at the school. Fortunately my administrator saw fit to offer me a position teaching 5th grade and even offered me a stipend to continue working a few hours each week solving various technology issues. Although I really miss participating in the overall edtec community as much as I was able to do last year, I have a lot to be thankful for with this new position and it has been a great experience. That being said, I still have some thoughts to share regarding the current state of technology in education and I thought I'd take some time to convey them (especially since I have little else to do while Xubuntu 9.04 loads on my student server).

Speaking of Xubuntu 9.04, if you haven't had time to read up on all the changes in Jaunty I suggest you do so. I think I agree with the consensus, which is basically that everything just works a little bit better. I'm glad to see they didn't adding any major changes like pulseaudio or compiz and instead seemed to focus more on making everything more reliable and faster.

9.04 has seen some significant improvements in LTSP as well, including something that has the potential to revolutionize (at least for me) how LTSP deployments are configured and used. That thing is support for local apps. You can read more about it in the release notes. If and when I get this feature working I'll be sure to post back about it.

Finally, I wanted to share something I discovered recently that relates to a popular former post of mine about setting firefox preferences. I've since found a better way to set these preferences. Instead of creating and editing a user.js file I now just edit the firefox.js file in etc/firefox/pref/

Things aside from the typical preferences that are included in Xubuntu by default that I decided to tic are:
setting the homepage
automatically clearing cookies and passwords after each session
not asking the user if they want to clear the cookies and passwords
not remembering any passwords by default

Here is my entire firefox.js file that I use at school:

// This is the Debian specific preferences file for Mozilla Firefox

// You can make any change in here, it is the purpose of this file.

// You can, with this file and all files present in the

// /etc/firefox/pref directory, override any preference that is

// present in /usr/lib/firefox/defaults/pref directory.

// While your changes will be kept on upgrade if you modify files in

// /etc/firefox/pref, please note that they won't be kept if you

// do them in /usr/lib/firefox/defaults/pref.

pref("extensions.update.enabled", true);

// Use LANG environment variable to choose locale

pref("intl.locale.matchOS", true);

// Disable default browser checking.

pref("browser.shell.checkDefaultBrowser", false);

// Prevent EULA dialog to popup on first run

pref("browser.EULA.override", true);

// Disable "safe browsing" feature that hogs CPU, HDD, etc. etc. in LTSP

pref("browser.safebrowsing.enabled", false);

pref("browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled", false);

// Disable annoying location-bar suggestion "feature" that is sludgy with thin-clients

pref("browser.urlbar.maxRichResults", 0);

// Disable offline/disk caching of web pages

pref("browser.cache.offline.enable", false);

pref("browser.cache.disk.enable", false);

// Other preferences

pref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://www.aeacs.org");

pref("browser.startup.homepage_reset", "http://www.aeacs.org");

pref("privacy.item.passwords", true);

pref("privacy.item.offlineApps", true);

pref("privacy.item.cookies", true);

pref("privacy.sanitize.promptOnSanitize", false);

pref("privacy.sanitize.sanitizeOnShutdown", true);

pref("signon.rememberSignons", false);

Hope that helps some of you out. Good luck! -joe