customizing Fedora Core 2

[jeff]

Aaron Bennett wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I need to make some customizations to FC 2, ideally at
> kickstart time. What I need to do is:
>
> - change the Gnome theme

I maintain a FC offshoot distro. I have my own "firstboot" which 
switches the theme in a shell script the first time the system 
runs after install. You may be able to put this in a kickstart 
file (excerpt):

# set default theme to blagCanyon
if [ -f /usr/bin/gconftool-2 ] ; then
        echo "Setting default theme"
        gconftool-2 --direct -s --config-source 
xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults \
        -t string /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_theme blagCanyon

        gconftool-2 --direct -s --config-source 
xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults \
        -t string /desktop/gnome/interface/icon_theme blagCanyon

        gconftool-2 --direct -s --config-source 
xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults \
        -t string /apps/metacity/general/theme blagCanyon

This will change the theme for all new users. Substitue your 
theme name for "blagCanyon" If there is a cleaner way to do 
this, I'm all ears. :)

> - change the browser preferences to use Firefox

Take a peak at these values you can set with gconftool-2

    /desktop/gnome/applications/browser:
     exec = firefox

I'm not sure if that's the right value or not as I leave mozilla 
default. You'll have to poke around with gconftool-2.

> - change the default firefox homepage.

I don't know how to do this without rebuilding firefox.

> Does anyone know what files hold this information?

OMFG. The /etc/gconf has a slew of XML files with this info.  
For a list of all the values, run:
gconftool-2 -R /

Later,

-Jeff