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Re: [ProgSoc] Getting Gnome to open links



On Sunday 28 May 2006 12:41 am, John Elliot wrote:

] Could you make life real simple for me and show example command-lines I

] can use to search dpkg, and perhaps offer a suggestion about what files

] I should be searching for..?

There are a handful of variations of apt-* and dpkg commands that

you'll find useful.

apt-get update | dist-upgrade | upgrade -- you're already familiar

with. dist-upgrade and upgrade differ (roughly) by the way they

handle dependencies -- dist-upgrade is more trusting / risky in the

way it'll near-blindly go ahead and remove, upgrade, and replace

packages in order to get from A to B.

dpkg -S <string> searches *installed* packages looking for which

one owns that file. Partial matches work, and ultimately unless it's

an uncommon string, this is rarely satisfying. Eg. search for 'ls'

and I get 13000 hits. Obviously you start piping to various greps

(dpkg -S ls | grep ls$ | grep bin ...) but no, it's not intuitive.

dpkg -L package tells you what files are owned by a particular package

which is useful when you want to work backwards (or is it forwards?).

But I don't use either of those, instead finding it faster and more

insightful to do things like: grep ls$ /var/lib/dpkg/info/*list, or

just cat the relevant package's .list file in that directory.

As you imply, there are some files that aren't easily discoverable,

try finding which package installed /etc/profile, f.e. -- hunt for

'profile' in /var/lib/dpkg/info/*postinst, if you're curious.

apt-cache search , and apt-cache show -- are two useful variants that

are worth getting comfortable with. They do pretty much exactly

what they sound like they'd do.

Now, with your thunderbird problem .. maybe it's time to move to

a real file browser, a real mail client, and a real DE .. ? Yerright.

Anyhoo, it sounds like a thunderbird problem, it hasn't registered

its capability of handling URLs. I'd reconfigure that package, or

worst case, re-install it. Respectively:

dpkg-reconfigure thunderbird

apt-get remove thunderbird && apt-get install thunderbird

Sometimes it's not the package that you think it is, however, and

so searching for related packages (that actually do the work) is

useful.

export COLUMNS=132 # trust me

dpkg -l | grep thunderbird

You might want to reconfigure (see above) the epiphany package(s).

You also, as an aside, may want to familiarise yourself with the

vagaries of Debian's alternatives handling -- the specifics of which

reside in /etc/alternatives, and the management of which is done,

somewhat cumbersomely IMO, by the update-alternatives app. I tend

to remove packages that I don't use, rather than navigate that util,

but obviously that doesn't work well on a multi-user box.

You've probably already discovered, f.e., that

/usr/bin/gnome-www-browser symlinks to

/etc/alternatives/gnome-www-browser which in turn symlinks back to

/usr/bin/epiphany

Jedd.