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

[L]

On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 12:50 PM, Michael Hannon <jm_hannon at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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:
>


speaking for mutt, if you have these lines in /etc/mailcap

application/pdf; evince %s
application/postscript ; evince %s

you should view pdf attachment using evince




>
>    # 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.
>
> Thanks.
>
> -- Mike
>
>
>
>
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