Dear arduino maintainer,

"help/reference" in the arduino GUI is expected to open a browser
with the pertinent file.  Instead of doing so, it displays a popup
with the messages

    Failed to open URI "file:///usr/share/arduino/reference/index.html".
    Failed to execute child process "/usr/lib/firefox/firefox"
    (No such file or directory).

How did I get there?

* Install recent arduino software
* Move previous $HOME/.arduino out of the way
* start arduino GUI software. For the purpose
  of this bug report, to get the messages in English,
  I did "LANG=C arduino" .
* In the GUI, trigger "Help/Reference".

As a (bloody) workaround, I did

    sudo ln -s /usr/lib/iceweasel /usr/lib/firefox
    sudo ln -s /usr/lib/iceweasel/iceweasel /usr/lib/iceweasel/firefox

This solves the problem for me, in a fashion.

Regards, and thank you for providing fine sofware,

Andreas

tags 706312 unreproducible
thanks

Thanks for the report, unfortunately I can't reproduce it. When I open
help in arduino from a clean wheezy install, iceweasel opens the file
properly.

Could you check ~/.arduino/preferences.txt for the line that says
"launcher"? It should say "launcher=xdg-open". The help is opened
using xdg-open, so it's possible that your xdg-open is looking for
firefox.

Try manually opening the file
xdg-open file:///usr/share/arduino/reference/index.html

If that doesn't work, then something is misconfigured with your
xdg-open. If you're missing xdg-open, then arduino should at least
recommend the xdg-utils package (I thought it was pulled in with the
desktop, maybe I was wrong...)

Cheers,
Scott

retitle 706312 arduino: Make preferences.txt more transparent, please.
severity 706312 wishlist
thank you

Hello, Scott,

now what? Anything left for arduino to do?

Adding documentation of the preferences.txt file,
and adding a pointer to that documentation to the
preferences.txt file as generated when it doesn't exist,
would have helped avoid the bug report.

Additional, I suggest renaming that particular property
from "launcher" to "browser.launcher".

I take the liberty of changing the bug a bit to that end.

Regards, and thank you for providing fine software,

Andreas

Hello, Scott,

thank you for the fast and helpful reaction!

I agree I was suffering a xdg-open misconfiguration issue.

Here's what I did to verify:

    $ grep xdg-open $HOME/.arduino/preferences.txt
    launcher=xdg-open

Next, I then tried

    $ xdg-open file:///usr/share/arduino/reference/index.html

Unsurprisingly, this worked. I then removed my bloody hack,
and the same did no longer work, instead it came up with
the same popup I had seen originally when I posted the bug.

Regards, and thank you for providing fine software and user support,

Andreas

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