Hi all,

When I tried to open PDF file format in firefox web browser, it shows the error of "Unhandled MIME type: 'application/octet-stream".

why that error was produced? how can i eliminate that?

i have used Linux(FC5) box and firefox version of 1.5.0.12



Thanks,

That's the server's fault; the server said the file is application/octet-stream (meaning any generic binary file) instead of the more specific application/pdf. Just save the file as a PDF and view it locally.

I have two "exact" same systems -- one at work and one at home.
The system at work will open PDF files with evince fine; the one
at home generates the "Unhandled MIME type: application/octet-stream" error message.

The evince binaries that I have are the same -- eVince Document Viewer 2.20.2. From other web sites, it seems there are data files that evince uses:

> ls -l /etc/mime*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 14148 Jul 10 2007 /etc/mime.types

and /usr/share/mime. The contents of these directories at home
and at work appear the same, but at home the protections are
just -rw-r----- while at work they are -rw-r--r--
The files are owned and grouped by root.

So I changed the protections of the files at home to 644:

chmod a+r /usr/share/mime/XMLnamespaces
chmod a+r /usr/share/mime/aliases
chmod a+r /usr/share/mime/globs
chmod a+r /usr/share/mime/magic
chmod a+r /usr/share/mime/mime.cache
chmod a+r /usr/share/mime/subclasses

and now evince works at home also.

There are a bunch of other files in this directory too, and
I expect that to be useful they would need to be readable too,
so I will do the following:

> find /usr/share/mime -type f -exec chmod a+r '{}' \;

just to make sure that everything is readable.

jim

thanks crazylyle, your post was helpful. I initially thought it's got to do with file extension associations in the registry after reading this article about mime application/octet-stream. The concept was far from what I initially thought...