FAQ, GNOME menus, first questions

[Michael Knepher]

On Tue, 2004-10-05 at 14:08 -0600, Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote: 
> On Tue, 2004-10-05 at 10:57 -0700, Michael Knepher wrote:
> > there's still no friendly way to edit the menus, and there probably
> > won't be a GNOME-wide tool until 2.10, if not later.
> > 
> 
> That really is a shame, since not being able to edit the menus to add
> stuff is one of the biggest complaints I hear from moderately-clueful
> Windows users who would like to switch. Heck, it's one of *my* biggest
> beefs and I've been using Linux for years...

Unfortunately, the implementation of the gnome menus is still in flux,
and will be undergoing more changes in the near future, so a menu editor
has been a low (as in null) priority for those involved in working on
the code. What would be nice in the meantime would be if someone could
hack together an interface that can parse the xml files for quick-and-
dirty editing of the current configuration. Sadly, I don't have the
skills to do such a thing.

> Now, why aren't the StarOffice and MS Office (DOC/XLS) extensions
> associated with the correct program? They were correctly set up in FC2
> and earlier... what changed? I tried to look for the file associations
> but for the life of me could not find them.
> 
Not only has the menu system changed in Gnome 2.8, but the mime system
has also. 

To manually associate an application with a filetype, right-click on a
file, choose Properties->Open With. If there are no applications listed,
click "Add" and navigate to the executable you want to use to open files
of that type (this setting affects all files of that type, not just that
specific file). You can add multiple applications to the list, which
will then appear in the context menu's "Open With ..." entry. This will
set the association on the user level. 

To do it at system level for an application that is installed from
binaries and doesn't follow the new mime spec is a bit trickier, and I
can't say for certain how to actually go about it, other than to do
something like the following: 

With the new mime system, applications should now include a line like
the following in the *.desktop file (taken from redhat-
spreadsheet.desktop):

MimeType=application/vnd.stardivision.calc;application/vnd.sun.xml.calc;application/vnd.sun.xml.calc.template

This line should include all mime-types the application is capable of
handling. If you edit the StarOffice *.desktop files to include the
appropriate mime types, I believe you should then be able to run (as
root):

update-desktop-database /path/to/*.desktop/files
[i.e., /usr/share/applications]

to register the associations.

If the mime-type doesn't exist, you'd probably need to look
in /usr/share/mime and see if you can create the files you'll need from
what's there already. Then you'd need to run

update-mime-database /usr/share/mime