file associations messed up

Hi All,

It seems that my file associations are all messed up:
- Running suse 10
- Running gnome

My problems:
- Launchers on the desktop display as plain text files. Double clicking 
opens the file in gedit.
- The build in help also opens xml files in gedit
- right clicking on eg a .desktop file -> properties -> Open with tab 
lists: "Select an application to open xxx.desktop and others of type 
"Unknown"
The applications listed are gedit (default) Kate and KWrite.

It seems that my system tries to open almost everything with gedit.

Any clue what might be wrong?

Thanks,

Stefaan

I found the problem:
The file /usr/share/mime/packages/freedesktop.org.xml was not a valid xml 
file. It started with some blanks (spaces or tabs), and then the  XML 
declaration  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
I removed the blanks, and updated the mime dB:
update-mime-database /usr/share/mime

This solved the problem.

Stefaan

Stefaan Van Cauwenberge wrote:
> I found the problem:
> The file /usr/share/mime/packages/freedesktop.org.xml was not a valid
> xml file. It started with some blanks (spaces or tabs), and then the 
> XML declaration  <?xml version="1.0"
encoding="UTF-8"?>
> I removed the blanks, and updated the mime dB:
> update-mime-database /usr/share/mime
> 
> This solved the problem.
> 
> Stefaan
> 

Thanks for sharing your findings, I have never seen this thing before :-/

birre@bblin3:~> rpm -qf /usr/share/mime/packages/freedesktop.org.xml
shared-mime-info-0.19-20

birre@bblin3:~> rpm -qiv shared-mime-info-0.19-20
.....
- The merged GNOME and KDE databases, in the new format.

- The update-mime-database command, used to install new MIME data.
.....


There is always new stuff to find , so you can't say it's boring :-)