Computer Services
Stanton/Wilmington Campus 
XP documentation and procedures
Mozilla 1.0

Note

Work on this temporarily suspened as of 8/9/02 ... hope to get back to it real soon. The .msi method of install works like a champ, but I need to write a vbscript to munge prefs.js for user still...

Background

Mozilla is the open-source code base for many commercial and other open source browsers, most notable is Netscape. As of this writing, Netscape 7 has not been released yet, so I'm going with Mozilla.

This effort focuses on providing unattended install of Mozilla into a Windows XP client environment which are on a Windows 2000 Server domain.

Goals

• Unattended installation of Mozilla, hopefully using a .msi installer package.
• Automatic configuration of prefs.js based on information we can gather out of the user's windows account profile.

References

• Bug #150948 - Unattended installation instructions (still open as of this writing)

Observations

• Pre-plugging values into user profile might be tough. The trip-up is the random .slt directory where the profile data is stored. This value doesn't appear to be in system registry. I did find it in registry.dat file. And no, this isn't a registry hive file either.
• netscape.public.mozilla.prefs newsgroup looks like a good group to look through...
• This post suggests mozilla -CreateProfile profilename
• Forget stashing profiles in a UNC
• Bug 70931, Override salted Profile directory Sigh, targeted for 1.0.1
• I read more newsgroup postings, lots of people bitching about the salt. This seems to be easy to get around in a domain environment because, since profiles are stored in %USERPROFILE%, then by design, the profile roams and is specific to each user. Therefore, only one profile will exist in this directory and you can use wildcards to deal with the random salt. The issue then is editing the prefs.js file or place a canned one there with desired settings. Again, not a problem, just from a batch file you just need to cd to
  %USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\default\*.slt
  Since you'll only need to do this on moz-virgin accounts, you can create a single profile using -CreateProfile and use wildcards to get into the .slt directory.
• Therefore the procedure breaks down to:
  • Deploy an instance of mozilla onto a machine
  • During a user logon to the domain (in logon script):
    1. check for existing profile and skip next steps if exists
    2. Run mozilla -CreateProfile default
    3. Run a script like perl to take a pre-edited copy of prefs.js from a test account set up the way you want it. Then replace user specific data with appropriate values. Take file, copy into the default profile dir above.
    4. Later, when user runs mozilla (if they do that is), everything will be set up for them.

Creating .msi install package...

Assumes you know how to use wininstall LE. If not, read over the microsoft docs on this package. Install wininstall on your workstation (not the clean computer) and create a share on it that you can get to with temp and discover directories inside it and copy the discover directory into it (so you can run it from client computer).

Warning, work in progress, incomplete as of 29-jul-2002

1. Prep a clean client computer. I do this by doing a normal unattended install of box, but in the [guirunonce] section of the unattend.txt file, I throw a "cmd" command in there to open a cmd window during first boot. This ensures almost nothing is running at the time.
2. net use \\yourbox\wininstall-share /user:yourbox\yourid
3. run \\yourbox\wininstall-share\discover\discoz.exe and specify that it saves .msi file to your wininstall share. Then when prompted to run the app, do your install of mozilla.
4. cd into %systemroot%\Profiles\All Users\Start Menu\Programs and rename, delete, or move created shortcuts to taste.
5. run \\yourbox\wininstall-share\discover\discoz.exe again and take after snapshot.
6. return to your workstation and run the veritas software console and click on Installer Package Editor. File->Open the .msi file. Ensure you click the "Install Only per Machine" option and resave.

Main XP Unattended Install Doc Page