MIME association woes, XDG_DATA_DIRS and so on (was: some issues with nautilus MIME associations and thumbnails)

[Siddharth Toshniwal]

Hi all,

No replies yet on this thread.... no one faced a similar
issue while doing a periodic RPM upgrade? 

I've dug some more into this issue and found another thread
which may be related to my problems, but no answers to that
thread as well. 
(Ref:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-vfs-list/2004-January/msg00021.html)

Read up the shared-mime-info spec and some other posts on
the gnomesupport.org site. With that I could make out that
I needed to export XDG_DATA_DIRS for some progress. I did
so in my .bashrc and .bash_profile (I guess I need have put
it in only one of them ideally, but anyways). 

After that my nautilus is showing PDF thumbnails (which it
was not earlier, so that's a nice discovery ;) but the file
associations are still not working (!?!??)

Now, shared-mime-info spec says that it does not tell which
application should be preferred to open which MIME type. It
may at most give a list of applications that 'can open' this
MIME type. So, where does the preference information reside??

Should I export some other environment variables (XDG_DATA_HOME
and so on) and if so, where? Or am I missing some package 
that I need to install?

To repeat, my problems currently are:

* Help files open in gedit even if I run yelp from
  the terminal after exporting the XDG_DATA_DIRS variable.

* No file association works on its own and double-clicking
  any file-type in nautilus just shows an error popup with the
  "no action associated" text.

Any help will be most welcome! :)

cheers,
Siddharth.



On Thu, 2004-05-27 at 16:11, Dwaine Garden wrote:
> Siddharth Toshniwal wrote:
> 
> >Hi Dwaine, all
> >
> >An update on these issues. Got some help from a friend.
> >The thumbnail generation was not working due to the JFIF
> >standard not being processed for some reason (my libjpeg
> >version is libjpeg-6b-31.1, do I need an update?).
> >
> >Ran the 'file' command on an image for which a thumbnail
> >was generated properly and one for which it was not.
> >
> >The output for the proper image (file1) was:
> >JPEG image data, JFIF standard 1.01, resolution (DPI), 144 x 144
> >
> >and for the one without the thumbnail (file2) was:
> >JPEG image data, JFIF standard 1.02, resolution (DPI), 144 x 144
> >
> >Opened the file2.jpg in gimp and saved it without any
> >changes. This changes the JFIF standard to the 'desired'
> >one (1.01) and thumbnail is shown :)
> >
> >So there is a workaround for this issue at least. The MIME
> >association still has me stumped. Anyone with clues as to
> >what to do for that??
> >
> >thanks,
> >Siddharth.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >On Wed, 2004-05-26 at 17:45, Dwaine Garden wrote:
> >  
> >
> >>Siddharth Toshniwal wrote:
> >>
> >>    
> >>
> >>>Hi all,
> >>>
> >>>Have been facing a few issues with nautilus for the last
> >>>couple of days. I've upgraded my system (which was originally
> >>>RedHat 9) using up2date using the rawhide channel, so I
> >>>guess I may have some packages which are not working well
> >>>with each other. I don't know exactly which upgrade has
> >>>resulted in these problems, so I'm posting for help if
> >>>anyone has solved similar issues. The details are as follows:
> >>>
> >>>* Nautilus does not show thumbnails for some of the images
> >>> within one directory while for others (which have the same
> >>> extension) it does so properly. Opening the images with
> >>> either eog or gimp does not report any errors.
> >>>
> >>>* I seem to have some problem with *all* my MIME associations
> >>> (including the ones that are configured by default usually)
> >>> Even if I associate them manually (.jpg to eog, .doc to
> >>> star-office and so on), nautilus does not open the same
> >>> when I double click in the file window. I have to open
> >>> any documents using the terminal only :( 
> >>> The file association is shown correctly the next time I
> >>> double click the file and click on 'Associate', but
> >>> somehow the association does not work on its own.
> >>>
> >>>The packages that I have installed are:
> >>> nautilus-media-0.8.0-2
> >>> nautilus-2.6.0-5
> >>> shared-mime-info-0.14-1
> >>> gnome-mime-data-2.4.1-4
> >>> gnome-vfs2-2.6.0-8
> >>>
> >>>I read up the following article but it is not clear to 
> >>>me yet as to what I've done incorrectly:
> >>>http://www.amitysolutions.com.au/documents/GnomeFiles-technote.pdf
> >>>
> >>>thanks,
> >>>Siddharth.
> >>>
> >>> 
> >>>
> >>>      
> >>>
> >>I have the same problem with Konqueror.   No thumbnails previews.
> >>
> >>Dwaine.
> >>    
> >  
> >
> I can replicate the same problem here.   The thumbnails in gimp do not 
> work.   Re-saving the jpeg file did produce the thumbnail in gimp. 
> 
> The preview function in konqueror does not work either.   And scanning 
> in kooka in jpeg format does not produce any output.   I did the same 
> test with xsane and it worked just fine.  
> 
> This is interesting....  Needs further investigation.
> 
> Dwaine.