[vox-tech] handling urls in Thunderbird on Kubuntu

[Dave Margolis]

Micah J. Cowan wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 25, 2006 at 06:48:03PM -0700, Dave Margolis wrote:
>> Micah J. Cowan wrote:
>>>  - What is the output of "namei x-www-browser"?
>> $ namei x-www-browser
>> f: x-www-browser
>>   ? x-www-browser - No such file or directory (2)
>>
>>> If x-www-browser appears to point at conquerer, you'll want to do a:
>>>   sudo update-alternatives --config x-www-browser
>> Did that.  Choose /usr/bin/firefox
>>
>> That didn't change the output of "namei x-www-browser" but it did fix 
>> the problem.  Now I'm reading some man pages to figure out what the hell 
>> I just did.
> 
> My fault, that should've been "namei /usr/bin/x-www-browser".

Cool.  That's now telling me about firefox.  I assume it would have said 
konqueror if I ran it a minute ago.

> 
> The Debian alternatives system: keeps some symlinks for generic binaries
> around, and provides a system to point them at your favorite apps. So,
> for example, Ubuntu systems ship with /usr/bin/editor pointing at
> /usr/bin/nano. I'm not much for nano, and prefer vim, so I immediately
> run "sudo update-alternatives --set x-www-browser /usr/bin/vim".

I assume you mean "editor" here - I got it now.

> 
> FWIW, you can also point cc at things other than gcc. :-)
> 
> Have a look at /etc/alternatives to see what symlinks exist there.
> /usr/bin/x-www-browser actually points at
> /etc/alternatives/x-www-browser, which in turn now points at
> /usr/bin/firefox.
> 

Makes lots of sense.  Thanks for the solution and the extra info.