Rolling Out Mozilla in an Organization?

jdclucidly asks: "I am a network administrator for a small non-profit (about 50 employees). I would like to roll Mozilla 1.2.1 out to all of our desktops. We don't have a single ghost image because the computers on site are too varied. Yes, I did my Googling. The source for the installer is just huge and mind boggling. Is there something like a Mozilla Administration Kit that will generate custom Mozilla installers? If not, would people on Slashdot be interested in starting a new project to make such a kit?" If you were going to deploy a "branded" version of Mozilla, company-wide, how would you do it, especially if you had to worry about a mixed OS environment?

"Here's what I want to do:

• Install everything but Quality Feedback Agent
• Set Mozilla as the default browser
• Disable 'Open Unrequested Windows' (kill pop-ups)
• Install Elveraldo's Crystal-Classic theme as default
• Set Google as the default search engine
• Set 'Georgia' as the default Serif font for Western and Unicode
• Enable HTTP Pipelining
• Enable FIPS internal cryptography
• Set toolbar to 'Pictures only'
• Set Home Page to my organization's intranet site
• Set start page to 'Blank page'
• Disable 'Hide the tab bar'
• Enable Middle-click for new tab
• Enable control+enter for new tab
• Default downloads to 'open a progress dialog'
• Disable Javascript and Plugins for Mail & News
• Enable quicklaunch
• Create an additional shortcut on the desktop and in quicklaunch that uses chrome/icons/mailnew.ico as it's source and points to 'mozilla.exe -mail'

As you can imagine, doing this on 50 computers (and making sure I got each of these) would be quite tedious. Are, there others out there that want to do the same thing. I checked the Mozilla newgroups. I checked the CCK Project page at Mozilla.org -- it appears to be pretty inactive. I checked out the Netscape 7 CCK, which is pretty robust but doesn't do everything I want and it's proprietary -- plus, I don't want all the NS7 proprietary crap on my network.

I installed Mozilla on my machine using the stub installer and had it save all of the .XPI components to a folder. I went in and extracted the .XPI's and examined them. It seems possible to do these things but not without learning XUL, JavaScript, XML and Mozilla.org's own stuffings -- not to mention setting up a Visual C++/Cygwin compiling farm for every next Mozilla release. Can I:

• Directly modify the defaults/prefs/all.js file to incorporate my preference defaults above and then recompress the .XPI?
• Add to the installer Crystal-Classic.jar somehow? Where are those changes made?
• Make the installer NOT allow the user to change any of this?
• Make the installer create the above mentioned shortcut?"

Comments

just copy the directory

[Anonymous Coward]

just copy the directory, mozilla doesn't need registry entries.. it stores all its settings in some whacky xml files

Re:just copy the directory

[SnowDeath]

Dont forget to copy the registry.dat when you copy Mozilla from Application data so that Mozilla knows where you are storing the Mozilla profile. As long as you are using 2000/XP (NT could work too, that's what I had have to use at work right now), just make all of your profile directories/files ready only *EXCEPT* the parent salted directory, they need read/delete to that for the lock file.

The way I have Mozilla set on our NT4 machines is to use the profile editor (name?), delete the default, create my own (named modlang, being that I run the modlang computer lab) profile, put it under mozilla.org in the program files directory, set everything to the way I want (popup blocking, default homepage, etc) and then simply copy mozilla.org directory (with mozilla already being installed on the profile creating machine) to each target machine.

The tricky part was figuring out that I needed to copy the registry.dat to default user's application data directory, after figuring that out it is cake.

The easy way...

[DaveOnNet]

Just prohibit the use of Mozilla in your organization and then make sure employees have access to the Internet. They're bound to set it up themselves that way.

It' won't be easy...

[weave]

I tried, went through hell. I assume you're doing this in a Windows environment. If so, be aware of some real killer limitations.

First of all, Mozilla doesn't understand UNC paths. If your GPO redirects %appdata%, you're screwed. Quit now. The mozilla registry.dat file goes in %appdata%\mozilla and if %appdata% is in a UNC of DFS share, it won't find it.

Then ... if you allow users to create profiles in the default location, below %appdata%\mozilla, expect profiles to go missing. Windows has a nasty habit of duplicating roaming profiles, like profiles\user, profiles\user.domain, profiles\user.domain.000, etc... Since your profile location is a hardcoded path in registry.dat, Mozilla will find it, but will try to load the profile in the stale profile location. If that doesn't exist now, it'll throw up a profile manager asking you to recreate one.

The solution to above is to create the profile manually via a command like:

mozilla.exe -CreateProfile "default z:\mozilla"

That will move the bulk of the profile (except registry.dat) to a fixed location out of the roaming profile.

For a lot more detail and my rant, read bug #162025, comment #28.

We have done a lot to get it working finally, including some logon vbscripts to create the profiles, repair prefs.js file, have some mandatory prefs.js entries that are replaced during logon if user changes them (like home page for us), etc...

We've been through hell but think we finally have it licked by working around mozilla bugs. We intend to post a page on our experiences, but not in the next 12 hours (the effective life of a slashdot story)

When it's ready, I'll e-mail you or feel free to contact me if you want the scripts as they stand now (we are still debugging some things).

It needs registry for Quicklaunch and dflt browser

[BlueUnderwear]

There is one thing where Mozilla does need the registry, namely quicklaunch mode. Quicklaunch mode is quite handy if you have impatient users: this launches all lengthy startup stuff in the background as soon as you log in to your workstation. When you then click on the Mozilla icon, Mozilla is there in under a second. Here is the required registry entry (in regedit format, just put this into a .reg file, and load it using regedit -s)

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Run]
"Mozilla Quick Launch"="\"C:\\PROGRA~1\\MOZILLA.ORG\\MOZILLA\\MOZ ILLA.EXE\" -turbo"

Other registry entries might be necessary to set Mozilla as the default browser.

Other handy tips for mozilla configuration (such as locked config items, automatically generated personal config, etc) can be found at http://www.alain.knaff.lu/howto/MozillaCustomizati on/

This is used in the schools participating in the LLL project.

Some Highlights:

• Any configuration options accessible in prefs.js can be stored in a locate mozilla.cfg file (optionnally locked in such a way that it can no longer be overridden by the user):
  • Disable 'Open Unrequested Windows' (kill pop-ups),
  • Enable HTTP Pipelining,
  • Set toolbar to 'Pictures only',
  • Set Home Page to my organization's intranet site,
  • Set start page to 'Blank page',
  • Enable Middle-click for new tab,
  • Enable control+enter for new tab,
  • Default downloads to 'open a progress dialog',
  • Disable Javascript and Plugins for Mail & News
• Using mozilla's own registry (%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Mozilla\registry.dat) set the profile directory (which contains prefs.js et al.) to be on the user's home directory (H:\). That way, you can have a personalized configuration (Mail & News) automatically created by a script. When the user first logs in, he doesn't need to set his email address, server name, etc for using Mail & News, everything is already done for him!
• Disabling of the bulky XUL.mfl file (whose sizes quickly add up if you have thousands of users): just create a directory named XUL.mfl, and Mozilla will be unable to create that file, and it will still work correctly!
• Automatical loading of the needed registry entries as soon as user logs in, using a netlogon script

At LLL, we deploy our machines using Udpcast, which might not be appropriate in your case (all your machines are different), but as other posters have pointed out, most of the client-side installation options can also be handled by a Zipfile plus a small install script to put stuff into the correct place.