On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 11:13:30PM +1100, Allan Duncan wrote:
My desktop runs a bastardised Fedora 14 with gnome 2.32
There have been a few software updates on my box of recent time and somewhere along the way the linking of keys to actions have broken. I have two specific cases to report.
there's been a squillion different ways to associate mimetypes with applications over the years, the latest fad seems to be xdg (as i discovered when fighting calibre's annoying habit of becoming the default pdf viewer whenever you upgrade it - i got so sick of that, my update-calibre.sh script just runs "rm -fv /usr/share/applnk/calibre*.desktop /usr/local/share/applications/calibre*.desktop" after every upgrade). personally, i can't see what was so wrong with ~/.mailcap or /etc/mailcap that it needed to be changed. i gave up paying much attention to desktop configuration shit years ago - there hardly seems any point, it'll have changed to something completely different within a few months. hmmm. http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html has Lennart Poettering as one of the three authors. that probably explains it - if it's anything like his other work, it's pointless change for the sake of pointless change and to avoid the tedious chore of LP bothering to understand how already-existing systems work rather than inventing his own half-arsed incomplete alternative. he's kind of like a slightly less obnoxious and significantly less talented djb. since you run Fedora and he works for Redhat as Chief OS Butcher to turn Linux into a poor imitation of a Mac, you're particularly vulnerable to having his creations foisted upon you. OTOH, xdg doesn't seem actually bad or broken like most of his other stuff....just a pointless reinvention.
Clearly one of the updates has changed a configuration, but grepping my home directory for the occurrence of "gedit" throws up a blank, so it must be deeper than the mere user. Looking in /etc/ didn't give any joy either.
the gedit update probably declared that it could handle text/html and somehow got highest priority. actually, AFAICT, there isn't any way to actually set priorities...it seems you can either set an application to be the default or the most recent definition wins (but don't take my word for it - i'm far from an expert on xdg). try 'xdg-mime query default text/html' or set the default with 'xdg-mime default application mimetype(s)' see also the man pages and other documentation.
Does anyone have some hints on where to look?
apart from xdg, look under /usr/share/applnk/ (KDE-specific, i think) or /usr/local/share/applications/ (gnome and others, i think) also in ~/.local/share/applications and probably in numerous other crufty locations if you've been continuously upgrading your system for years. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #312: incompatible bit-registration operators