Changing sensible (i.e. default) browser
I want to use ~/firefox/firefox as my default browser. (I have an older version of Firefox installed system-wide, and 2.0 in my home dir). I think I set this somewhere in XFCE, and it works fine for most apps. However, some apps (e.g. xpdf) still use Konqueror — yikes (takes a long time to start up).
sudo update-alternatives --config x-www-browser
This gives me a list to pick from, and I can change to the system-wide Firefox or Opera, but ~/firefox/firefox is not in the list.
sudo rm /etc/alternativesx-www-browser sudo ln -s /home/mpromber/firefox/firefox /etc/alternatives/x-www-browser
Links in xpdf didn’t open at all anymore, instead:
run-mozilla.sh: Cannot execute /home/mpromber/firefox/x-www-browser-bin
update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/x-www-browser x-www-browser /home/mpromber/firefox/firefox 10
The last number is the “priority”, I have no clue what the value should be here. I tried 90, 10, and 1, and it didn’t make a difference as far as I could tell. In all three cases, ~/firefox/firefox is last in the list given by update-alternatives --config
Then …
sudo update-alternatives --config x-www-browser
… and pick the newly created ~/firefox/firefox entry.
However, trying to open links from xpdf again didn’t work (same error as above).
So then I just picked /usr/bin/firefox from the list in update-alternatives --config. Surprisingly, this works fine, opening a new tab in my running ~/firefox/firefox process (maybe it will open the wrong system-wide Firefox if I don’t have the right one running).