Earlier this year, my ISP changed their billing notification emails from application/pdf to application/octet-stream. Trying to view it from mutt showed binary gobbledygook. After some flailing around, I found out that I had to put an entry into .mailcap, namely...
application/octet-stream; mimeopen %s When I tried to open a pdf file from mutt, I got a text dialogue asking me which program to use. I chose /usr/bin/epdfview, and mutt has used that as the default ever since. Now epdfview is masked for removal in a few weeks. apvlv is the recommended lightweight alternative. After some screwing around and discovering an obscure bug in the apvlv ebuild, I finally got apvlv up and running. You ***MUST*** build poppler with USE="xpdf-headers", or else the apvlv ebuild dies. I reported the bug, and the apvlv ebuild now should check for app-text/poppler[xpf-headers]. I emerged and ran rox-mime-editor and have no clue what to do to change from epdfview to apvlv. There are no man or info files for rox-mime-editor. Is there a better alternative mime-editor? As a heavy-handed solution, I searched for the string "epdfview" in ~/.local. In ~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list I found an entry for pdf using epdfview. I zapped that line, and tried reading the pdf in mutt. I got the text dialogue again, and specified /usr/bin/apvlv. mutt now uses it all the time for pdf files. In contrast, Firefox is much easier, with a dialogue for applications. -- Walter Dnes <waltd...@waltdnes.org>
