Re: Helper apps / "open file with" config?

On Wed, 2004-12-08 at 17:10 -0800, Karsten M. Self wrote:
> My mime type associations appear to keep changing.
> 
> Currently, PDFs want to open with kghostview.  My preference is gv.
> There are several other PDF-capable views installed.
> 
> The "Open file with" dialog defaults to kghostview, and lists no other
> viewers.
> 
> How do I configure this?

(Please don't start commenting here how things on the Gnome desktop are
(not) working.  desktop-devel-list is better suited for that.)

Start Nautilus, locate a PDF file, right-click, select Properties...,
select Open With tab, pick one.

Now, in order to be visible in the Open With tab (and in Galeon) an
application must have a .desktop file.  If gv doesn't come with one, you
need to create one and run 'update-desktop-database'  The .desktop file
must naturally contain 'MimeType=application/pdf;'-line.

You don't necessarily need Nautilus to select the preferred application,
you can edit $HOME/.local/share/applications/defaults.list directly.
(If you're using something else than the default $HOME/.local, you
should know.)

One "interesting" thing to know is that the web server and content
sniffing can come up with different MIME type for the same file.
Probably not with PDF files, but with MS Word documents some server
announces 'application/msword' and after downloading it changes to
'application/vnd.ms-word'  While both are logically identical, one is an
alias to the other, gnome-vfs can't handle it at the moment.  When you
set the preferred handler in Nautilus (content sniffing says it's
'vnd.ms-word') it has no relation to the default handler you see in
Galeon when it asks whether to open the file (which the server says is
'msword' instead.)  You need to manually add the 'msword' in
defaults.list file :-/


-- 
Tommi Komulainen                                 [email protected]
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