msw's questions

My trusted friend gnome-open (which I call go for short) has ceased working. It interprets any argument given to it as a directory and will not recognize anything else.

I have traced out the somewhat indirect path connecting the gnome menu system which in turn relies upon the XDG subsystem which requires /etc/gnome/defaults.list, /usr/share/application/mimeinfo.cache which itself is generated by update-mime-database(1) which requires that $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS and $XDG_DATA_DIRS be set properly.

Everything seems in order and yet mime-type recognition is not working. This would be tolerable from the shell (because I usually know the mime-type of the file I want to open), but applications like Chrome cannot launch anything properly.

I'm sure I've missed something, and this is on a machine under daily desktop use that was recently updated to Natty Beta 1 (and is current to the repos as of one hour ago). I don't know that the gnome-open failure was caused by the upgrade or followed it during some package installation.

When running update-mime-database - usually automatically launched by apt-get - why do I reliably get complaints like:

Unknown media type in type 'all/all'
Unknown media type in type 'all/allfiles'
Unknown media type in type 'uri/mms'
Unknown media type in type 'uri/mmst'
Unknown media type in type 'uri/mmsu'
Unknown media type in type 'uri/pnm'
Unknown media type in type 'uri/rtspt'
Unknown media type in type 'uri/rtspu'
Unknown media type in type 'fonts/package'
Unknown media type in type 'interface/x-winamp-skin'

It doesn't seem to be hurting anything, but chronic errors during updates risk obscuring an error that I do care about.

I am running Banshee 1.8.0 on a more-or-less vanilla Meerkat installation. I was most pleased when I plugged in an old iPod Nano and it Just Worked.

However, when plugging in the iPod, Nautilus/Gnome asks for an application to handle the newly inserted iPod. The dialog presents no applications that can handle the device and allows no manual choice.

I have reinstalled banshee with apt-get purge and also install --reinstall but neither added an association. As before, when manually opened, banshee happily talks to the iPod, it just won't launch on plug.

I suspect there is a missing association in gconf or something similar but I'm not sure where this information lives.

I've got a pure vanilla Lucid Desktop installation on a severely RAM limited laptop (with a slow drive for extra happy swapping).

I'm trying to remove packages that snuck in on ubuntu-desktop which I know I'll never use. For example

apt-get remove --simulate '.*openoffice.*' 

worked without a problem, but didn't save me any RAM, either. So I've looked to the things that are actually running, and as the box doesn't have bluetooth,

apt-get remove --simulate  gnome-bluetooth

seemed reasonable but took package gnome-user-share along with it. But that's okay. However, if I don't want printing capabilities,

apt-get remove --simulate cups

wants to take out ubuntu-desktop which is a metapackage which depends on literally 100 essential sub-systems (e.g. nautilus and gnome-panel among others). Of course, removing cups won't cause the removal of nautilus, but it does seem like it will leave my apt package state confused.

Am I missing some deep Ubuntu mystique or would removing cups be bad? (I put the --simulate flag in my examples lest someone cut-paste-cry).