Fedora 9: mutt/alpine: problem viewing attachments; xdg?

[Antonio Olivares]

--- On Tue, 12/2/08, Michael Hannon <jm_hannon at yahoo.com> wrote:

> From: Michael Hannon <jm_hannon at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Fedora 9: mutt/alpine: problem viewing attachments; xdg?
> To: "Fedora List" <fedora-list at 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