Contents
Default programs to be started
When running your Desktop Environment, what application runs when you click some file from your browser? Does Firefox, Nautilus, rox-filer or midnight commander and every application behave the same way? What happens when you uninstall the application that was meant to read your videos?
These common problems find various answers.
Debian Reference Manual : Customizing program to be started
Environment Variables
Refer to: EnvironmentVariables
System wide
Debian Alternatives
Debian Alternatives is a convenient mechanism to replace hard written command names in some program calls. It does so by managing the symlinks behind the generic names of the commands.
You can see current settings with :
$ upgrade-alternative --get-selections
and change them by :
# upgrade-alternative --config <name_of_command>
Example :
# update-alternatives --config x-www-browser Il existe 3 choix pour l'alternative x-www-browser (qui fournit /usr/bin/x-www-browser). Sélection Chemin Priorité État ------------------------------------------------------------ * 0 /usr/bin/firefox-esr 70 mode automatique 1 /usr/bin/chromium 40 mode manuel 2 /usr/bin/firefox-esr 70 mode manuel 3 /usr/bin/surf 30 mode manuel Appuyez sur <Entrée> pour conserver la valeur par défaut[*] ou choisissez le numéro sélectionné :
sensible-utils
sensible-utils provides scripts for common use cases.
This package comes handy when writing scripts which are meant to start a browser, editor or a pager, since you don't have to hardwrite the name of the software, but rather rely on sensible utils to run the user's prefered software or what makes the most sense.
$ dpkg -L sensible-utils | grep /usr/bin/ /usr/bin/select-editor /usr/bin/sensible-browser /usr/bin/sensible-editor /usr/bin/sensible-pager
XDG and MIME
XDG provides a set of utilities (xdg-utils...) and commands (xdg-open...) to work with files according to their file types.
This might be used by your applications (file manager such as midnight commander, or web browsers) when you set up actions according to file types.
dpkg-reconfigure
To be confirmed
In case several packages provide the same functionality, reconfiguring them will make the reconfigured package take precedence.
Example:
# dpkg-reconfigure <package> dpkg-reconfigure gdm3
mailcap
Used by some MUAs such as mutt, and other programs.
Permits some generic commands, see run-mailcap
run-mailcap, view, see, edit, compose, print - execute programs via entries in the mailcap file
Application specific
Firefox
Go into following menu : Preferences > Applications (or type about:preferences#applications in address bar).
rox-filer
${HOME}/.config/rox.sourceforge.net/MIME-types
Install icons
When a program is installed, it can copy a file programname.desktop into /usr/share/applications. This suffices to get a launcher in the desktop panel and desktop menu regardless of the window manager (Xfce, GNOME or KDE).
The specification of the .desktop file is a FreeDesktop standard.
Profiles
Modern desktop environments allow you to use alternative configuration sets (or combine different configuration sets).
One problem is that each of the desktop environments, and freedesktop each use a different way to activate/deactivate these configuration sets.
the desktop-profiles package solves this, by providing a common way to control the activation/deactivation of such configuration sets.
This still leaves the problem of the actual creation of such configuration sets, but making it easy for different ideas of what should be default to co-exist, and compete for market-share.
Look into the files under /etc. Some desktop environments allow you to preconfigure proxies, javascript and cookie policy etc. For KDE you may also refer to http://techbase.kde.org/SysAdmin for more info about the configuration, including making settings immutable to users.