On Wed, 05 Oct 2005 at 08:27AM -0500, Dan wrote: > I'm a math grad student, so it's unsurprising that my Gnome desktop > contains a bunch of Mathematica files (which end in .nb). I'd like to > have Gnome open up Mathematica when I double-click on a .nb file, but > Gnome thinks these are text files -- which they are, in the same sense > that an .html file is a text file. Why does posting to the list help you solve a problem yourself? :) To associate a file extension with a mime type, follow the instructions here: http://www.freebsd.org/gnome/docs/faq2.html#q22 The only problem is that when they write <xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> the update-mime-database program complains, so you just add a question mark: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> I have no idea why this works, it just does. The exact files I used are as follows. Here's mathematica.xml in ~/.local/share/applications: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <mime-type xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info" type="application/mathematica"> <comment>Mathematica notebook</comment> </mime-type> Note that application/mathematica is a registered mime type. Otherwise I think you fake it with application/x-whatever. And here's nb.xml in ~/.local/share/mime/packages: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info"> <mime-type type="application/mathematica"> <comment>Mathematica notebook</comment> <glob pattern="*.nb" /> </mime-type> </mime-info> Then I ran update-mime-database as the article says, logged out and in -- and everything works. I associated Mathematica to the file type and everything works perfectly. Thanks for all your, um, help! Dan -- Ceci n'est pas une .signature. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: Digital signature Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20051005/6bc81d8a/attachment.pgp