Setup Solaris Firefox for multi-users and multi-languages

When you need to setup Mozilla Firefox on shared machine like NFS server and SunRay server, I think this is the easiest way to support multi-users and multi-languages.

1. Download Solaris packages from mozilla.org
2. Install the pkg

# bzip2 -d firefox-2.0b2.en-US.solaris2.10-i386-pkg.bz2
# pkgadd -d firefox-2.0b2.en-US.solaris2.10-i386-pkg

Now Firefox will be installed into /opt/sfw/lib/firefox

3. Copy language pack files into /opt/sfw/lib/firefox/chrome

ja.jar and ja.manifest are for Japanese. We can get these files from other download bits. For example, when you pick up Linux .tar.gz for Japanese, it contains these files under chrome/. Please copy necessary <lang>.jar and <lang>.manifest files into the directory.

4. Set "intl.locale.matchOS" to "true" in /opt/sfw/lib/firefox/greprefs/all.js

The default value is "false". This option started working from Firefox 1.5.

If Firefox is started in Japanese locale on user desktop, Firefox will pick up ja.jar automatically by this setting. If user is using the desktop in English, Firefox will be started in English. When language pack for the locale is not installed, it will fallback to English.

We can support multi-language and multi-users without any user setting e.g. installing extension.

Comments:

Does multi-user mean that the profile is shared? We would like to share a default profile for a common user, assuming we don't care about cache, bookmarks, history, etc. Also, how would I run firefox from a readonly media? Thank you, -- pj

Posted by PJ on September 13, 2006 at 10:50 AM JST #

Hi PJ, Thanks for comment. This is a way for sharing the firefox installation including lanaguage packs among your team. I think it's not possible to share the cache and history because these contain personal information. For the bookmarks, I understand we can prepare the default bookmarks in it. I'll try to find it how to do it.

Posted by Masaki on September 13, 2006 at 10:57 AM JST #

Thanks for this very useful info. Have you done the same thing for openoffice.org? Thanx

Posted by W. Wayne Liauh on September 13, 2006 at 02:39 PM JST #

PJ, I'm sorry I didn't understand your questions well. "profile" itself can not be shared, but the default values of profile can be prepared in it, which will be copied to user's profile when user starts Firefox on their environment. Firefox can start from readonly media, user settings will be stored into user's home directory. I'll try to find it in next time.

Posted by Masaki on September 13, 2006 at 02:50 PM JST #

Wayne, Thank you very much for comment. Hmm, I'm sorry I haven't tried OpenOffice.

Posted by Masaki on September 13, 2006 at 02:52 PM JST #

Masaki: Thank you looking into this. I wanted to lock down a profile because we have a shared/common user for running firefox. -- pj

Posted by PJ on September 13, 2006 at 10:53 PM JST #

[Trackback] hey folks! sorry to say, i’ve been to busy to blog for the last week. so this might come a bit late, as this news is already some days old (woah, this is decades in internet time!): the official release of firefox 2.0 is available for solaris. yo...

Posted by stotti.blog() on November 02, 2006 at 09:50 PM JST #

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