--- On Tue, 12/2/08, Michael Hannon <jm_hannon(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
From: Michael Hannon <jm_hannon(a)yahoo.com>
Subject: Fedora 9: mutt/alpine: problem viewing attachments; xdg?
To: "Fedora List" <fedora-list(a)redhat.com>
Date: Tuesday, December 2, 2008, 5:50 PM
Greetings. One of my "customers" is having a
problem viewing
attachments with command-line mail clients, alpine and
mutt, on a system
running Fedora 9, i386.
The attachment type of most interest is PDF. He's been
getting error
messages to the effect that the attachment is an
unrecognized MIME type,
and that a given attachment could not be found. (Note that
the
different error messages probably arise under different
conditions,
after either his own environment or the system environment
has changed
slightly.)
In fact, PDF should be recognized:
# grep pdf /etc/mime.types
application/pdf pdf
# grep pdf /etc/mailcap
application/pdf; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s
I've been able to work around the problem by modifying
/etc/mailcap to
explicitly invoke a PDF viewer, as:
# grep pdf /etc/mailcap
application/pdf; /usr/bin/xpdf %s
I presume I could also use evince instead of xpdf.
The xdg-open man page states:
xdg-open opens a file or URL in the user's
preferred application.
If a URL is provided the URL will be opened in the
user's
preferred web browser. If a file is provided the file
will be
opened in the preferred application for files of that
type.
xdg-open supports file, ftp, http and https URLs.
When I try to use xdg-open, it ALWAYS tries to open a
browser (firefox),
apparently because it's always being "fed" a
URL, even for local files
(as "file://foo.bar"). I'm not sure about
this.
Also I have yet to figure out how to tell xdg-open what my
"preferred
application" is. Where does it get that information?
If you can shed any light on any of this, please let me
know.
From my own experience(s), I can say that xdg-open will open the application(s) that are
the default in your desktop.
For example if you use KDE, and you do a xdg-open file.pdf, the pdf will be opened up
using okular,
if you do the same in Gnome, evince is the default and it will open the pdf. Similarly
for picture file, KDE browser will open gwenview(xdg-open file.jpg?), and in Gnome G Thumb
Image Viewer or something like it :)
It would depened on your desktop that you use, KDE, GNOME or other like XFCE and how you
define xdg-open or how it is defined in your PC.
Thanks.
-- Mike
--
Regards,
Antonio