Re: [gentoo-user] Xmonad, beagle-search, and mime types

[YoYo siska]

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 05:33:35PM +0100, Damian wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 4:05 PM, Willie Wong <wwong@××××××××××××××.edu> wrote:
> > On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 03:45:14PM +0100, Damian wrote:
> >> So I tried to see how xdg-open works, but the man page didn't give me
> >> any useful information. The related command, xdg-mime, doesn't work as
> >> I expected.
> >
> > I asked a similar question a week or so back.
> I searched in my mails but I couldn't find it. Sorry, I probably
> didn't enter a relevant search string.
>
> >> But xdg-open (and therefore beagle-search) still refuses to open jpeg
> >> images with geeqie.
> >>
> >> Any ideas?
> >
> > xdg-open is just a shell script. If you are interested, take a look at
> >  less `which xdg-open`
> > and you will be enlightened as to why it is a complete piece of crap
> > unless you are using KDE, GNOME, or XFCE. (Hint, notice how nowhere in
> > the script does it read whatever you modified with xdg-mime.)
> >
> > A possible way to work around it (depends on your application, which,
> > in your case, is beagle, which I am not familiar with) is to go into
> > the offending application that is calling xdg-open and see if you can
> > configure MIME types in there yourself. The application that made me
> > look this up, Jabref, does allow that configuration. Your mileage can
> > of course vary.
> Thanks Willie for your answer.
>
> Sadly beagle-search doesn't offer any option. The developers must use
> only gnome.
>
> I guess I will have so find another beagle front end, or choose a
> different desktop search engine.

xdg-open tries to determine the desktop enviroment you are running and
uses its way to open files...
If you are in a kde session, it will just run kfmclient XXX (kde way to
open files in their application), for gnome it will use gnome-open or
something...

So even if you are not logged in a "full" gnome or kde session, but have
some of its packages installed, you can "trick" xdg-open to use that
enviroment
for kde just export KDE_FULL_SESSION=true,
for gnome GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID=something

so you can run beagle-search with
GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID=something beagle-search

you have to  set which applications to use in corresponding config
(for kde, just run konqueror/dolphin and right click a file, don't know
for gnome)

for kde, you need the package kde-base/kfmclient, which should depend
juast on kdelibs, for gnome-open you need gnome-base/libgnome, which
shouldn't have much dependences that you don't have allready if you have
some gtk app..

btw, gnome-open/kfcmclient will open files in any available program that
correctly registers its mime-types, not only in kde/gnome apps..., so
you really need only kfmclient/libnome to use it...


one last remark, if set KDE_FULL_SESSION/GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID for
xdg-open and it starts a gnome/kde app, that app might think that there
are some desktop specific things running, that are not, though I haven't
seen any real problems with it...
You might however just edit the "detectDE" function in xdg-open to
always behave like gnome/kde without settings the variables...

yoyo


PS the idea of xdg-open using a browser, when it cannont detect which DE
are you running, is that a browser usually knows how to open which
files... and you should have your preffered browser set in $BROWSER...