KDE file associations
 

Hello,

In KDE the default file associations are pretty rubbish. It insist on opening things in a preset application. Ok fine. Go to the contol panel and change that.....

However, when i change default file associations, KDE does not act on it. And when I go back to the control centre, things are the same as they were before. This is really making KDE pretty useless as I like to play a lot of multimedia stuff and am getting sick of having to manual select Xine every time.

Any ideas?

Thanks :-)

Yes, somthings broken in your setup, or your not setting things quite right. Setting the Associations in the control panel should be permanant.

When you chnage your settings, do you click apply? and does a window popup with a progrss bar, saying saving settings... appear?

yeah, it appears to work fine.

maybe a permissions problem??

You wouldn't have happened to have accidentally logged in graphically as root, would you?

Assuming it's a permissions problem, try looking around in the ~/.kde directory for anything amiss (like something owned by root instead of <userid>, or something without write permissions). If so, then perhaps issuing the following will fix it:

cd ~
chown -r userid:usergroup .kde

No - i'm not a noobie.... are you kidding? lol

i know how to chown recursively. My job is a unix administrator. I just don't know that much about KDE.
It's the same for all users, even if I create a new one for testing.

I was wondering if anyone knew specifly how KDE deals with file associations.........


maybe i wrote my post in a newbie way. sigh.

in kde those references are stored in
`kde-config --prefix`/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache

this stuff can get all messed up as you have found out

if you have a file in $HOME/.kde/share/applnk
about an application then it overrides the file in
`kde-config --prefix`/share/applnk
and most likely can mess up your ability to do file associations with that app
so delete the broken ones of those and then do
kbuildsycoca --noincremental
i think that will rebuild the database

wish i knew more

Hmm, yes i suspect there is something wrong with my config. not that i've ever changed it previously.

I will just have to do the digging i guess. doh :-(


Thanks for your suggestions. I points me in a direction.......

Your backticks, '`', are confusing me; could you provide a paste-able CLI snippet in a code block?
(& Yes, I did RTFM).