still have not understood how to define default programs

[Ross Laird]

Hi Christian;

> I am searching for a way to define my default web-browser,
> email-client, filemanager ...
> Please can someone explain how to do this

If you are on Debian, you can set your default browser environment using 
this command entered from a root console:

 update-alternatives --config x-www-browser

This should give you a few choices (Galeon, Firefox, Mozilla, whatever). 
Choose the one you want. You will probably have to reload your x session 
to see the results.

The default email client can be set in a number of ways: by changing 
what the panel loads when you click on the mail icon (mine loads 
"mozilla-thunderbird", for example), or by changing what the browser 
loads when you click on a mailto link in a web page (this varies by 
browser, but if you use Firefox, one way is to use the launchy 
extension). Also, you may find it useful to change the "preferred 
applications" settings in gnome. I can't remember how to start this app 
in xfce, but in Gnome you go to Desktop Preferences, Advanced (I think) 
and Preferred Applications. This sets the browser and email applications 
for gnome packages (and these settings might be used by gnome packages 
running in xfce).

Finally, I have set my default file manager (nautilus, xffm, rox) simply 
on the xfce panel (I'm using xffm): right-click on the file manager 
icon, choose properties, and enter the command (just "xffm", without the 
quotes, if you want the default xfce file manager. If you like nautilus, 
you can start it up by typing alt-f2, then entering nautilus 
--no-browser (I think, but that may not be quite right). This will 
change your xfce background to the gnome background and will also put 
gnome icons on your desktop. There are a few forum postings about this 
over at forum.xfce.org.

Hope some of this helps. I am not an expert, but have found a few useful 
tips (mostly on the xfce forums).

Ross

>
> Someone wrote:
>
> | Since Xfce is very moduler, the script that launches the browser
> | cannot depend on xffm being there. As such, it actually doesn't use
> |  xffm to determine the default browser - instead it checks the
> | BROWSER environment variable, and if that isn't there, tries
> | mozilla, then a couple of other defaults. You could set your
> | BROWSER environment variable to solve this
>
> Please can you explain how to set this enviroment variable.
> A small example would be nice.
>
> :)
>
> Thx
>
> ~ Christian


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