MIME-type handling in GNOME

[kai12]

hi all,

I'm unhappy with the choice of application made by Opera's M2 email client when opening PDF attachments to my mail -- I was told Opera falls back on the systems default application based on its MIME type.

This is on a Debian Etch system running GNOME 2.14.3, and I don't quite understand where MIME types and default apps are specified. I know I can right-click on a specific document, bring up the properties dialog and pick a default app on the "Open With" tab. After this, GNOME will use a different default, but Opera doesn't seem to know about it.

Are there other places to control GNOME's default apps?

cheers, kai

[Segfault]

Opera is not a Gnome application. You may have better luck setting it in Opera preferences.

[kai12]

thanks, Segfault!

I actually started out in an Opera forum where I found out that, apparently, Opera checks the system settings for MIME types. Anyway, it doesn't seem to be the case for GNOME.

Is there a different way of accessing the MIME type handling in GNOME than the way I described?

cheers, kai

[Segfault]

OK, let's make it clear. You went to

Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Downloads

there you set your preferred application for pdf and it didn't work?

[kai12]

Right. That's where I went - and my choice there is "Open with other application" which I specified to be "/usr/bin/acroread". Also, there is only one entry for pdf in the list of MIME types which is "application/pdf".

And it actually works fine for Opera "the browser" - if I click links to PDFs they are opened using acrobat reader. This setting matters, too: when I changed it from acroread to evince, that's just what happened. But it doesn't work for email attachment, which get opened using ghostview by Opera M2.

kai

[Segfault]

Hmhh ...
There is a bunch of configuration files in ~/.opera - this setting is stored somewhere there. I don't use M2 myself, sorry, can't help further.

[kai12]

ok, thanks segfault, for following up to this point.

I just "grep"ped for '\<gv\>' in .opera to see if this was specified verbatim in one of the config files and got nothing in return.

Maybe someone else has ideas?

cheers, kai

[blinky]

Try

/etc/mailcap
/etc/mime.types

might help?

[kai12]

Try

/etc/mailcap
/etc/mime.types

might help?

great, thanks!

/etc/mailcap had several entries for application/pdf, the last of which specified ghostview to open .pdf
it also contained the useful line of advise:

#  Users can add their own rules if they wish by creating a ".mailcap"
#  file in their home directory.  Entries included there will take
#  precedence over those listed here.

adding

application/pdf; /usr/bin/acroread '%s'; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"; description=Portable Document Format; nametemplate=%s.pdf

which I copied from /etc/mailcap to ~/.mailcap at its end did the trick.

thanks very much, this was most helpful!

now I'm just wondering when/how lines are added to /etc/mailcap ...

cheers, kai