mikewillis, Author at SUSE Communities

November 14, 2014 4:24 pm

12,298 views

Customizing the appearance of GDM in SLED 12

SLED 12 ships with GNOME 3.10 which means GDM 3. GDM 3 provides very little scope for customising how it looks. In this article I'll describe some pros and cons of the officially provided ways of customising GDM 3 and how you can go further customising by hacking. Testing changes will require you to […]

Tags: Customizing, GDM, GNOME

Categories: SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, Technical Solutions

By: mikewillis

November 3, 2014 3:35 pm

8,856 views

Additional multimedia codec support for SLED 12

As with most Linux distributions, SLED’s out of the box multimedia capability is somewhat limited in terms of codec support. It has support for MP3, the OGG family and some others, but it doesn’t have support for commonly used codecs such as H264 and AAC and those required for DVD playback. There are […]

Tags: codecs, Multimedia, SLED

Categories: Desktop, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, Technical Solutions

By: mikewillis

October 29, 2014 10:15 am

2,254 views

Easily protect Firefox on SLED on multiple machines against POODLE attack

As has been much publicised recently, (including Understanding POODLE), an unfixable vulnerability has been found in SSLv3 and it is recommended that support for it be disabled. Mozilla have said that SSLv3 will be disabled by default in Firefox 34, but SLED, very sensibly for an Enterprise distro, uses the Extended Support Releases of Firefox […]

Tags: Firefox, POODLE

Categories: SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, Technical Solutions

By: mikewillis

January 16, 2014 12:40 pm

7,391 views

Setting and locking Firefox preferences in SLED

Setting and locking preferences in Firefox is something that Mozilla provides documentation for but unfortunately the methods described don't work for Firefox as it is packaged by SUSE for SLED. Here's my guide to how I handle the setting of default preferences and the locking of Firefox preferences in SLED. This guide assumes 64bit SLED […]

Tags: Firefox

Categories: SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, Technical Solutions

By: mikewillis

July 17, 2013 11:01 am

5,937 views

Additional multimedia codec support for SLED 11 SP3

As with most Linux distributions, SLED's out of the box multimedia capability is somewhat limited in terms of codec support. It has support for MP3, the OGG family and some others, but it doesn't have support for commonly used codecs such as H264 and AAC and those required for DVD playback. There are packages available […]

Tags: codecs, Multimedia, SLED

Categories: Desktop, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, Technical Solutions

By: mikewillis

December 13, 2011 10:15 am

3,590 views

Relocating non-persistent parts of Firefox profile.

Whilst the previous Cool Solution only redirected urlclassifer3.sqlite, this method redirected urlclassifer3.sqlite, Cache, OfflineCache and the fastloader files XUL.mfasl XPC.mfasl. This method also uses environment variables rather than creating a symbolic link, so it's cleaner. I figured out this solution after reading a bug report at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=239254 […]

Tags: Firefox

Categories: SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, Technical Solutions

By: mikewillis

July 25, 2011 12:00 pm

4,371 views

Additional multimedia codec support for SLED 11 SP1

As with most Linux distributions, SLED's out of the box multimedia capability is somewhat limited in terms of codec support. It has support for MP3, the OGG family and some others, but it doesn't have support for commonly used codecs such as H264 and AAC and those required for DVD playback. There are packages available […]

Tags: Codec, Multimedia

Categories: SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, Technical Solutions

By: mikewillis

November 16, 2010 5:35 pm

6,377 views

Relocating Firefox's urlclassifier3.sqlite file

urlclassifier3.sqlite is the file that Firefox (as of version 3) uses to store information about websites that are known to host Phishing and/or malware. The data is regularly updated from Google. As typing 'urlclassifier3.sqlite' in to Google and spending a few minutes looking through the results will show, It can be something of […]

Tags: Customizing, Firefox

Categories: SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, Technical Solutions

By: mikewillis

August 6, 2010 2:07 pm

49,830 views

Building Simple RPMs of Arbitrary Files

Something I've found very useful when managing machines running SLED is building my own rpms. If I want to put scripts on to the machines I package them as an rpm and then if I need to update them, I can put the new versions in to the rpm, increase the version number and push […]

Tags: Customizing, RPMs

Categories: SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, Technical Solutions

By: mikewillis

May 27, 2010 2:46 pm

83,214 views

Easy Running of Scripts at Boot and Shutdown

In a previous Cool Solutions submission I made reference to running scripts during shutdown and boot. This is something I do on all the machines I manage. I use such scripts to perform maintenance tasks and make sure various custom configurations are in place. Here's how I do it. First of all you create an […]

Tags: Linux Administration

Categories: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Technical Solutions