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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

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.

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.