As we all know, Gnome is braindead system, and nobody in sane state of mind touches it, except with 3 meter long hot stick to beat the beast down.
Now, even if you have reached first step of sanity, which means that you haven’t installed it at all. Then still gnome system fails to honor default applications what you try to setup, but still insists into opening some its’ own braindead defaults. For example, it insists into opening horrible Firefox browser, which is basically crime against humanity.
Now so that we wouldn’t be left into stage of despair, we need to do some manual patching, since gnome sub-systems are too braindead to pickup correct defaults by themselves.
First: Lets see list of things what we need to fix:
[code]
gconftool-2 -R /desktop/gnome | less
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Now we can see that there is multiple braindead defaults, which break correct operation of the system. So lets change some of them into more sensible values:
[code]
gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/ftp/exec ”opera -newtab %s”
gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/exec ”opera -newtab %s”
gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/https/exec ”opera -newtab %s”
gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/mailto/exec ”opera -newtab %s”
gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/applications/browser/exec ”opera -newtab %s”
gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/man/exec ”kfmclient exec man:%s”
gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/applications/terminal/exec konsole
[/code]
And simlarly same thing for all remaining braindead defaults, and we are done.
After this just to ensure that braindead gnome is really reading updated values, just reset gconfd process.
[code]
gconftool-2 –shutdown
[/code]
And finally victory over the evil Gnome!
Now as summary, however, this means that Linux sucks deeply as desktop environment, since you have to change various default applications not only one, but two or three times. Separately for each different case. At this point of time all Mac OSX and M$Windows users should be rolling in the floor, laughing themselves to dead. waiting few seconds…, and voila done. Linux desktop coverage is 100% since all the others have died in laughing ridiculous Linux Desktop concepts.
PS. I would REALLY like to see that Copy’n’Paste and Drag’n’Drop would finally work in Linux desktop between any two applications. Current situation is just pure insanity. We are living at year 2008, in all other possible mainstream desktops, simple Copy & Paste or Drag’n’Drop has worked for tens of years between any two application. But in Linux, … , IT STILL DOES NOT WORK!!!!!!
Strangely enough, when anyone dares to point out that there is issues with copy-paste in Linux, then herd of Linux geeks starts crying ”I don’t have any problems with it”. Now, if you show them one of the many cases when it does not work, then they start to wander and start defending with comments like ”you don’t need to do such copy-paste” or ”I don’t need to do such ever, it’s your own problem if you do that”, or something similar in attempt to water down the problem.