[Wylug-discuss] Gnome 2.6. Mime Type Icon Woes

[John Leach]

--
On Sun, 2004-06-20 at 13:03, Dave Fisher wrote:
> Being a Debian user, I've only just 'upgraded' to Gnome 2.6. ... Oh, my
> God!

May Allah rain good fortune upon your gconfd.

> The so-called 'spatial browsing' model is even more annoying and
> anti-productive than the users of trendier distros had led me to
> believe.

Yeh, object permanence is a real pain.  I don't know how we've lived
with it over the past few million years.

> Almost all file types (including devices, directories, etc. are
> represented by a default 'dog-eared page' icon.  With the result that my
> shell now gives me far more visual browsing clues than the bloody GUI
> file manager!

I'm having a similar problem with one of my Debian installs.  Icons are
broken in the same was as you describe, but my gtk theme is also
screwed.

> So, can anyone tell me where gnome hides the configuration to associate
> file types with icons?

As far as I can see, ~/.gconf/desktop/gnome/interface/%gconf.xml holds
an entry named "icon_theme", which is set to "Industrial" in my case.

This is translated to /usr/share/icons/Industrial somewhere along the
line.  In this directory "index.theme" points at the various
sub-directories containing the icons.  The icon files are named by their
use (e.g: gnome-dev-cdrom.png).  I believe Nautilus knows to look for
these particular file names for the file types, but I'm  not 100% sure
on that.  Seems sensible (with names based on mime types being a big
hint, e.g: gnome-mime-application-x-shockwave-flash.png)

> If so, why are none of my installed themes able to do it properly?

On my broken Debian machine, I get "gconf couldn't start" warnings on
login, so I'm putting it down to this currently (even though I can see
that gconfd is running fine and other apps that gconfd depend on work
ok).  In your case I'm not sure.

Try creating a new user and logging in as that.  That might indicate
whether it's a legacy config issue.

Also, in my case, if I log into the broken machines via ssh and run
gnome-session, everything works fine.  This even works when logging into
the same machine from itself.  This seems utterly insane for me.  Nobody
on the debian gnome mailing list has been able to help.

I have 2 other Debian desktops which upgraded with no problems
whatsoever (i386 and powerpc).  I actually expected to get all the
problems on the powerpc, rather than then Intel.

>
> Could it be that the specs for themes have changed and that Debian
> simply hasn't packaged any of the new theme formats yet?

Well all the common ones work for me currently (on the working
machines).

> All positive suggestions appreciated.

I hope this is of some help.

John.
--
GPG: B89C D450 5B2C 74D8 58FB A360 9B06 B5C2 26F0 3047
WEB: http://www.johnleach.co.uk
--
Content-Description: This is a digitally signed message part

[ signature.asc of type application/pgp-signature deleted ]
--