The home page is defined by the browser.startup.homepage preference.
Before Firefox is used the first time, this can be defined in a file in the default preferences, e.g. /usr/share/iceweasel/browser/defaults/preferences/ on Debian or /usr/lib64/firefox/browser/defaults/preferences/ on Fedora. There should already be a .js file there; replace prefs("browser.startup.homepage", "..."); in that file with the value you want, or add a new line if there is no such line already.
Once Firefox has been used once, the value is defined in the user profile's prefs.js file, e.g. in ~/.mozilla/firefox/profile.default/prefs.js (replacing profile with the appropriate value), in the same way as above. (There may be other profiles alongside the default one.)