Thursday, October 13, 2011

Fixing Thunderbird to open URL links in Firefox

After I moved my previous Fedora 14 installation to Fedora 16 (Beta) I noticed clicking URL links in Thunderbird do not open Firefox (or any other browser I have installed) anymore.

It was not easy to find a fix (there are many results in google for variations of the same problem) but in the end I found out why I am experiencing this, so I'm leaving a note here for reference.

In Fedora 14 I installed Firefox 5 from Spot's personal repository, so I had to change the default command to run on URL clicks from "firefox %s" to "firefox5 %s". The problem is that I ported the /home directory to the new installation, so it inherited that settings that is obviously wrong now.

Unfortunately, I could not find anything in the GNOME 3 interface to fix it, so I had to resort to the command line:

This shows the issue:
$ gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command
firefox5 %s

And this is the fix:
$ gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command -t string "firefox %s"
$ gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/https/command -t string "firefox %s"

2 comments:

  1. Well, since you manually changed your gconf key the first time around, you did not get the new default when it changed to fix this bug. http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/gitweb/?p=gnome-vfs2.git;a=commitdiff;h=2b046ebf9f15136f701fa84a6ddb4450776f7607

    You should probably reset it to the default, so it continues to work in the future.

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  2. Is there an easy, foolproof way to reset them to default?

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