I am using Xubuntu beta, which includes XFCE 4.3.90.2 (Xfce 4.4 BETA1) and Thunar 0.3.1svn-r21434 Problem: when using Thunar to browse files and open them, OpenOffice.org files are opened as archives with Archive Manager They should be opened with OpenOffice.org instead.
Hm, I don't have OpenOffice around to test, but this looks like a problem with the shared-mime-database on Xubuntu (maybe upstream problem). There should be glob rules to recognize OpenOffice files, and the magic rules for OpenOffice files should have higher priority than the more generic archiver file types. CC'ing Jani.
I still need to read up on this and figure out how to set default mime-action handlers for a stock thunar/xfce/xubuntu install. I have the same prob with gimp, it opens files for viewing instead of gqview whic is also installed. Do I need to provide a custom defaults.list file and set the XDG_DATA_DIR envvars to point to the dir containing it or something like this? With OOo OTOH it could be that it is not part of the default install so possibly that's why xarchiver tries to open the zipped OO docs.
You can just put a custom defaults.list into /usr/share/applications.
there's already a /usr/share/applications/defaults.list in ubuntu installed by desktop-file-utils. The same package installs an /etc/gnome/defaults.list, and there's /usr/share/gnome/applications/defaults.list (which is empty) installed by gnome-vfs. I'll talk to the ubuntu gnome maintainers as this may be an ubuntu specific setup.
I prepended /etc/xdg/xubuntu to XDG_DATA_DIRS in startxfce4 and put an applications/defaults.list file in that dir with associations for gqview, xfmedia, xarchiver etc.. Now that takes precedence over default ubuntu/gnome in /usr/share/applications when in Xfce, while still overriden by user prefs in ~/.local. I say this can be closed, although if you have a cleaner solution I am all ears.
Well, the associations are done via defaults.list. If you want different defaults for gnome/xfce, you'll need to set different XDG_DATA_DIRS. Tho, I'd suggest to do the defaults.list via a distro specific package, i.e. on ubuntu a package with /usr/share/applications/defaults.list with gnome apps, and on xubuntu a package with /usr/share/applications/defaults.list with xfce/gtk apps (and kubuntu, edubuntu, etc.). Of course, only if such a package exists.
(In reply to comment #6) > Well, the associations are done via defaults.list. If you want different > defaults for gnome/xfce, you'll need to set different XDG_DATA_DIRS. Tho, I'd > suggest to do the defaults.list via a distro specific package, i.e. on ubuntu a > package with /usr/share/applications/defaults.list with gnome apps, and on > xubuntu a package with /usr/share/applications/defaults.list with xfce/gtk apps > (and kubuntu, edubuntu, etc.). Of course, only if such a package exists. Right, the defaults.list is provided by xubuntu-default-settings a native package but XDG_DATA_DIRS still needs to be set by startxfce4. It cannot be put in /usr/share since it would conflict with gnome's and xfce and gnome should be installable along each other.
Hm, you could add a virtual package "desktop-base-files" which would be provided by xubuntu-desktop-files and ubuntu-desktop-files (for example), and which would install Xubuntu/Ubuntu defaults to /usr/share. On the other hand, simply setting XDG_DATA_DIRS works as well. ;-)