Re: Open URLs in Icedove emails in Iceweasel, how?

[Christian Seiler <christian@iwakd.de>]

On 06/20/2015 02:24 PM, Ken Heard wrote:
> On 2015-06-19 11:27, Christian Seiler wrote:
> 
>> You can try to set a default browser explicitly:
> 
>> xdg-mime default iceweasel.desktop x-scheme-handler/http \ 
>> x-scheme-handler/https
> 
> I ran that command as route and the following was returned:
> 
> touch: cannot touch ‘/root/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list’: No
>    	such file or directory
> /usr/bin/xdg-mime: 781: /usr/bin/xdg-mime: cannot create /root/.local
>    	/share/applications/mimeapps.list.new: Directory nonexistent
> touch: cannot touch ‘/root/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list’: No
> 	such file or directory
> /usr/bin/xdg-mime: 781: /usr/bin/xdg-mime: cannot create /root/.local
> 	/share/applications/mimeapps.list.new: Directory nonexistent
> 
> Did I do something wrong?

This is really weird. Did you run that as root? (Note that running GUI
applications as root is discouraged due to security issues.) But then,
if you log in graphically, that directory should be created
automatically...

If you want to get rid of the immediate error, you can do (as root)
mkdir -p /root/.local/share/applications

But if you run xdg-mime as root itwill then only change the
preferences for root... So unless that's what you want, you should
note that  the commands I mentioned are to be run as your normal user
and change the preferences only for that user. They are not directly
meant to be run as root.

If you want to change these settings globally (note that a user can
override them, using e.g. the above command), you can create (as
root) a file /etc/xdg/mimeapps.list and put in the following content:

[Default Applications]
x-scheme-handler/http=iceweasel.desktop
x-scheme-handler/https=iceweasel.desktop

(It's an ini file, add the entries if the file already exists.)

Very useful in this context:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Default_applications
(As far as I can tell, there is little Arch-specific content on
that specific wiki page and it applies to most distributions.)

Hope that helps.

Christian