mime type error

[Philip Rodrigues]

> Thank you!  I blindly followed your directions and the result is:
> no more mime errors on every program opening
> the system booted as normal (speed)
> running top, nothing is dominating cpu time, and knotify is nowhere to be
> seen.

Excellent! :-)

> Again, thank you, I have a payroll due in 5 days and I was worried if I
> could run Open Office.

You're welcome :-).

> Now, my opinion is that changing the directory name is not a fix but
> instead a  diagnostic function.  

That's correct...

> Could you please tell me: 
> what happened
> why did changing the directory name do a temp solve
> how do I do a permanent solve
> where can i go to get more info

Sure, here goes:
KDE organises file associations (that is, what application is used to open a
certain type of file) using MIME types. This is just a scheme for
describing different file types; for example, MP3 files have a
category/type of audio/mp3. An important feature of KDE's MIME type
handling is that file extensions can be used in determining a file's type,
but is not required - therefore, you can have executable files without
needing a .exe extension.

So, what I *think* happened on your system (though I can't be sure) is that
you, or some application, modified the settings for the
application/octet-stream or perhaps application/x-executable MIME type(s).
Therefore, when KDE tried to open any executable application, it got
confused and couldn't open it correctly. Hence the messages about
application/octet-stream. Why this resulted in knotify eating CPU and RAM,
I don't know. Perhaps you somehow ended up with broken permissions for some
audio type.

[Not entirely relevant background information: knotify is the process which
controls KDE applications' notifications, that is, sounds, message boxes,
popup windows, etc. So, it should be running when KDE runs, but it, of
course, shouldn't take up all your CPU or RAM]

KDE stores user specific settings in ~/.kde, and, specifically, the settings
for file associations in ~/.kde/share/mimelnk (or at least, the settings
there are related to file associations in some way). So, when you renamed
that directory, KDE could no longer find the incorrect settings, and just
restored the defaults, which work.

As for a permanent fix, it depends exactly what you want. Provided that your
KDE installation works as you want, I would suggest leaving it as it is.
However, if you had some custom file associations, these will have been
lost by the move. So, if you want to get those settings back without
re-entering them manually, you can restore part of the ~/.kde/share/mimelnk
directory, leaving out the parts which refer to application/octet-stream.
Like I say, it's potentially a lot of work, so if it works now, don't [try
to] fix it.

Hope that explains it all - a little work, and perhaps I can make that into
a useful FAQ or part of the User Guide.

Regards,
Philip
-- 
KDE Documentation Team: http://i18n.kde.org/doc
KDE Documentation Online: http://docs.kde.org

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