default homepage should be available on disk

Increasing severity to major, assigning to jdub for more branding enjoyment

ideally, the default homepage would be an html file on the hard disk of the
machine, rather than a page on the internet - but let's stick with this for now,
if we can get some webpage foo ready for packaging when limi is back, we can
switch to that instead.

fixed in mozilla-firefox 0.9.3-2.2ubuntu3 and epiphany-browser 1.4.0-0ubuntu2

agreed that it should be a disk-based home page, good point

reopening and retitling, severity to major: we should make sure this is done for
the Final release. it's unlikely that we'll have the material or time to
integrate before the Preview release.

*** Bug 8021 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Looks like the homepage change didn't take; I get the upstream default here, as
does the submitter of Bug#8021

Default homepage is correct now, but the issue remains of having it available on
disk. That's not a deal-breaker for me, to be honest, and it's a pain to
package up images and such in the Debian diff.

Is there some way that we can have a skeleton page on the disk which will
refresh to the real website if it's available, but fail non-intrusively if it isn't?

It's not supposed to be the website front page on disk, but a welcome and mini
howto kind of thing. It shouldn't be in the browser packages (avoiding the
debian diff problem), rather, it should be in something like ubuntu-base. I'm
going to look at this again when we get the artwork. If you can suggest the
appropriate package, that would be great (it won't be huge).

ubuntu-artwork seems like the appropriate place, given its desktopishness

(In reply to comment #10)
> ubuntu-artwork seems like the appropriate place, given its desktopishness

Giving I've had some ideas for documentation, and if you still havn't devised
this specific intro page's structure and makeup, I'll be happy to trhough some
sketches. We can even make it include some of the first steps documentation
there, although I have though about incorporating those into yelp.

That would be great, sivang.

(In reply to comment #12)
> That would be great, sivang.

Cool, I'll set to do it. This should be an HTML file right? (as intended to use
a browser homepage) If so, am I allowed to add the logo and maybe some Ubuntu
GFX on it or this causes problems with packaging?

That would be perfect.

Some web browsers (elinks and lynx comes to mind) will check for the presence of
the environment variable WWW_HOME and if present will use that URL as their
default home page. Maybe WWW_HOME should be defined by default for all users
(maybe in /etc/profiles?) so that it points to a Ubuntu page so that these 2
text-based brwoser have the same "home-page" behaviour than Firefox and Epiphany.

mozilla-firefox (0.99+1.0PR.1+revertedto0.9.3-0ubuntu3) warty; urgency=low

  * Use offline homepage

 -- Thom May <email address hidden> Wed, 13 Oct 2004 12:12:07 +0100