Notices

qole: I forgot to maintain that I also had the XRefs set to .wav Mplayer
but the issue still persist even with current update.
I read that this is python, but hoped to see your changes in a git, to see how you solved the latest issues, so I can learn more.

but when I install this package from deb on my N800 - it works fine

niv:

I haven't put this in a git repository because this code really isn't mine. I've hacked a few pieces of it to fix bugs and Maemo 5 OS changes, but it is mainly the same package.

Does your filename end in .wav because it needs to have that extension to work...

Are you having these problems on an N900 or an N800?

1. yes my filename does end with .wav
2. given the same dbus-switchboard It doesnt work on the N900 but does on the N800

I've installed dbus-switchboard, and found that it works very nicely indeed although it took me a while to figure out that from file manager I have to look for dbus-switchboard in the list of possible and impossible applications to open an odt file with.

From the browser, it immediately launched OO Writer when clicking on an odt file, but when I did so for the first time, at one point during the long wait for OO, mypaint opened on top of it, and I swear I haven't even touched the phone while it was doing that. I have to see whether this is reproducible, since so far it's a one-timer.

Perhaps it's of interest how many mistakes I made before successfully adding OO Calc as a handler for .ods files Unless there are some good ways of improving the GUI, there definitely needs to be a howto in wiki.maemo.org eventually!

First, new entries to XRef did not show up at all, because I was typing in the handler manually instead of choosing from the drop-down menu. Don't know how many times I tried before working that out.

Then, in entering the file extension, it was not clear whether I needed to type in [ods] or [.ods] or ods or .ods, so I tried first simply ods. Such a faulty entry in XRef could however not be deleted, although it disappeared when closing and reopening the GUI without saving.

Well, I finally made it, and it immediately worked, without having had to reboot (as I had expected from the notice that popped up during installation).

EDIT: A more minor detail: the icon for the GUI is almost completely invisible in the Maemo menu. Only while pressing on it do I briefly see a greyish wormlike thing.

Since I've managed to add .ods and .odp handling, I now want to do something more useful for myself (I'm not really using OO much), namely to add support for e.g. postscript files. I would like to have them handled by Easy Debian's evince, because the Maemo version is not capable of that and more excitingly I could immediately print them out from evince on network printers via CUPS.

Evince in Easy Debian can handle the following mime types
But I have no idea how to include them, associate them to the corresponding file types, and map them all to "debbie evince". Is that at all possible through the GUI, or do I need to manually edit files (if so, which)?.

niv:

I got .wav files to associate with dbus switchboard by changing both audio/wav and audio/x-wav in the defaults. I think you may have missed the first one...

rebhana:

You have to add non-existant types to /usr/share/applications/defaults.list manually.

And yes, I am aware that the GUI, not written by me, could use some serious work. I would like to try making a new GUI in qt as part of my self-training. But I don't know if or when I'll get the time to do that.

So probably the best thing for now is to start documenting all the quirks and tricks of this GUI, and if I get an opportunity, I'll write a new GUI.

I have encountered a (for me) more serious problem with dbus-switchboard:

On the archive for scientific preprints, I had no difficulty reading pdf files either with the osso-pdf-viewer or evince by opening for example this paper by Stephen Hawking, http://arxiv.org/pdf/0710.2029, in the browser. Even though this does not have a file extension pdf, it is recognized as a pdf file and handled accordingly. But with dbus-switchboard installed, it no longer opens the osso-pdf-viewer or evince, because it's no longer recognized as pdf. It instead offers dbus-switchboard as a catch-all application, but that apparently works on file extensions only.

So I de-installed dbus-switchboard, and this now works again. Would you have an idea of how to make that also possible with dbus-switchboard or would that require a completely different setup not based on file extensions?

Btw, I noticed that the deinstallation is not restoring everything to the previous state. Before, /usr/share/applications/defaults.list was a symlink to /etc/gnome/defaults.list, and now they are separate with different contents. That doesn't seem to have any effects as far as I see, though.

dbus-switchboard currently only handles files with file extensions.

The simple solution here is to download files and add extensions, then use the file manager to open the files with dbus-switchboard.

The more complex, but far better, solution is to figure out how to pass the detected mime type to dbus-switchboard and use that to determine the handler, rather than the file extension.

Does anyone know how to pass the mime type to dbus-switchboard?