[Techtalk] How to change Gnome's mimetype handling

[Wim De Smet]

On 3/4/07, Eeva Järvinen <eevaj at welho.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 03, 2007 at 05:01:06PM -0800, Akkana Peck wrote:
> > The standard system mime type database is in /etc/mime.types,
> > with applications for each mime type specified in /etc/mailcap.
>
> Oddly enough, /etc/mime.types says:
>
> audio/x-pn-realaudio          ram rm
>
> which is, AFAIK, completely correct.
>
> /etc/mailcap is almost empty, just a lines for audio/mod, image,
> application/msword, application/pdf, application/postscript, text/html
> and application/x-java-jnlp-file, but that's all, so apparently
> mailcap is being phased out, and it is replaced by something
> Gnome-specific.
>
> It seems to me that the answer is lurking somewhere in Gnome's
> configuration, but there's so much of the stuff I can't make neither
> head nor tail out of it -- I'm not a Gnome developer, even though I
> consider myself computer-literate.  Heck, I admin, configure and
> specify content management systems fora living!  This can't be that
> hard once I find out where to start, but I wouldn't want to start
> reading C source or getting familiar with how Gnome's vfs works
> internally: it just seems so unnecessary.  I mean, I can read and
> write C and numerous other computer languages, but what's the point?
>

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=142927
Same problem abouts. Links somewhere around here:
http://www.gnome.org/learn/admin-guide/2.14/mimetypes-modifying.html
which might be a good place to find a work-around. I'm thinking
something is broken in one of the packages you installed though, and
it broke the gnome mime database. Or rather, the mime detection
database (bunch of globs to relate files to mimetypes).

greets,
Wim