On 2021-05-10 5:05 p.m., Paolo Galtieri wrote:
I recently ran into an issue with files with .ovf extension. The issue is that VMware Workstation will not import files that end in .ovf. A file that ends in .ovf shows up as follows of Fedora 34:
file *.ovf returns
XML 1.0 document, ASCII text
"file" tells you what the actual content is. In this case, I assume, it's an XML file. The mime-type however, can also be determined by the file extension.
What's interesting is that if you have VirtualBox installed and then try to open a .ovf file with VMware workstation it works because according to the VirtualBox documentation:
Oracle VM VirtualBox creates file type associations automatically for any OVF and OVA files on your host OS.
In fact if I run caja and click my way to the OVF file, right click on the file and look at the properties I get:
Type: Open Virtualization Format (application/x-virtualbox-ovf)
If I don't have VirtualBox installed I get
Type: XML document (application/xml)
So who should setup the file association for .ovf files? How do I go about changing the association for .ovf files from XML document to something else so that I can associate it with VMware Workstation?
VMware is proprietary software and any file associations should be managed by it. If you're installing vmware and it doesn't set up its file extensions, then that's a problem with its packaging. Nothing to do with Fedora.