Planet Geek

Audacity Ate my Konqueror

Geekitude

I've been having a problem in KDE for the last 6 months or so (perhaps longer, I'm not sure). On the face of it, it seemed like a standard file association problem, but it was pervasive.

Recently I switched to using Konqueror as my primary web browser. With the advances in plugin support for things like Flash and Shockwave, the actual browser platform has become less important. Since I switched away from Firefox, I've been using Konqueror and, for the most part, things have been pretty good.

Except for one annoying bit.

Because I'm a developer, I have to, on occasion, do the 'View Source' thing from inside my browser to see how the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in a page I'm working with is put together. For some bizarre reason, Konqueror had decided that when I selected View Source, it would try and open the source in... Audacity.

Now, I'm all for great programs like Audacity. It's a fantastic multi-track audio editor. But in no way, shape, or form is it a source code viewer.

This afternoon I finally sat down to try and figure out what the heck was wrong. Konqueror has a great tool for associating various file types with helper applications (something old time users of Mozilla are very familiar with), but the sheer number of associations is staggering. And since I didn't know what type was that was causing the external app to be launched, I didn't know which one to look for.

I got my first clue when I noticed that Konqueror had associated .py (Python) files with Audacity. "Aha!" sez I, "That's not right!" - I started to change the association, then went "Wait, I don't want Audacity started ever. Just remove the helper." Which confronted me with the dialog box stating that Audacity had been attached to text/plain and could not be removed.

Another clue! Navigated to text/plain, saw Audacity listed in the helpers, and promptly moved it down to the bottom of the list (Okay, maybe someday I'll want to use Audacity. Allow me my foibles.) Clicking Apply and then trying a view source finally got me... the source!

Note that this entire problem was solved inside KDE without resorting to editing configuration files, typing cryptic commands, or knowing esoteric and mystical Linux incantations. It was a misconfigured browser, nothing more. In the good old days this would have required said gyrations to fix, but I'm constantly impressed at how far environments like KDE have come, making problem solving like this a lot more intuitive.

Posted by dbs at October 26, 2007 12:03 AM