[CentOS] kghostview and xdg-open. Need to fix problem across whole system

Tue May 5 20:57:47 UTC 2009
Paul Johnson <pauljohn32 at gmail.com>

In Centos 5.3, a bad problem has surfaced in user land. We want to use
either Evince or Adobe acroread as the pdf view, but the update of
kdegraphics has somehow screwed up these systems so that the odious,
horrible, awful pdf viewer kghostview is used.  It is what you get
when you doubleclick on pdf files, it is what programs get when they
try to use xdg-open framework.

This happens even though xdg-open seems to think it is pointing at Adobe.

$ xdg-mime query filetype manual.pdf
application/pdf
$ xdg-mime query default application/pdf
AdobeReader.desktop

I've had it happen before that users make mistakes and then the mime
types are accidentally re-defined in the user accounts. I have not had
it happen across all users accounts that something goes so wrong.

How can I tell the Gnome mime system to always use evince for opening
pdf, not kghostview?

What's wrong with xdg-open?  It says AdobeReader.desktop, but it
points applications at the other.

Thanks in advance

PJ

-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas