installing calibre 0.9.16 => "No MIM types found"

[mjost]

Hello,

installing calibre 0.9.16 (and also before 0.9.14) like described on http://calibre-ebook.com/download_linux somehow "confused" my Suse 12.2 installation.

I already started a German thread on this on Suse forum, when it first happened with 0.9.14. (Back then, I didn't knew, that it is caused by calibre installation)

https://forums.opensuse.org/deutsch-...en-werden.html

Last time, this somehow "healed" itself after some time; now with installing 0.9.16 I have the problem again.

Here is a summarized translation of my German post:
(Also the error messages are translated from German - so they may not be 100 % accurate, compared to the English original messages - sorry)

-------------------------------------------
When I log in on KDE I get two error dialogue boxes:

Error - Plasma desktop environment

and

Error - interface for command execution

Both contain the same text:

The MIME types can not be found:
"inode / directory"
"inode / block device"
"inode / chardevice"
"inode / socket"
"inode / fifo"
"application / x-shellscript"
"application / x-executable"
"application / x-desktop"

In dolphin there are just placeholders instead of icons for the files, just as in the desktop folder.
Also in the applications are missing icons, e.g. the close button on FF tabs or the folder icons in TB
If you attempt to launch applications from the desktop folder, I get instead the "Open with" dialog.

and


In the K-menu icons are there and the application can be started. (phew)

The same thing happens with a different user account.
If I log in on the other hand, as root, everything is fine.
If I create a new user, it has the same problem.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Regards

Martin

[kovidgoyal]

calibre's installer uses the standard xdg package to install mime types. If mimetypes are getting broken then you have a problem with xdg. Do a bit of googling to learn how to regnerate mimetypes databases for kde.

On my distro (Gentoo) it is

kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental

[mjost]

Hello kovidgoyal,

thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I got a working system back.
It seems I felt - sort of - victim of my own paranoia. (with some friendly support from the calibre installer).

Short story:
My root user has "umask 077" in the shell startup files.
Setting this to "umask 000", rerunning the installer, running "kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental", logging out and in again fixed it.

Moral of the story:
To me it looks as if the calibre installer should use explicit permission for the installed files, instead of (implicitly) relying on umask.

Here are the details:

:> kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental
  ...
  kbuildsycoca4(12056) KBuildServiceFactory::createEntry: Invalid Service :  "/usr/local/share/applications/calibre-ebook-viewer.desktop"
  kbuildsycoca4(12056)/kdecore (services) KServicePrivate::init: The desktop entry file  "/usr/local/share/applications/calibre-lrfviewer.desktop"  has Type= "Application"  but no Exec line

  kbuildsycoca4(12056) KBuildServiceFactory::createEntry: Invalid Service :  "/usr/local/share/applications/calibre-lrfviewer.desktop"
  kbuildsycoca4(12056)/kdecore (services) KServicePrivate::init: The desktop entry file  "/usr/local/share/applications/calibre-gui.desktop"  has Type= "Application"  but no Exec line

  kbuildsycoca4(12056) KBuildServiceFactory::createEntry: Invalid Service :  "/usr/local/share/applications/calibre-gui.desktop"
  kbuildsycoca4(12056) parseLayoutNode: The menu spec file contains a Layout or DefaultLayout tag without the mandatory Merge tag inside. Please fix your file.

Ahhh...
Ok, looked at the file (as root) found no problem. Huh ?

  godot:> desktop-file-validate /usr/local/share/applications/calibre-ebook-viewer.desktop
  /usr/local/share/applications/calibre-ebook-viewer.desktop: error: while reading the file: Permission denied

Ahhhh [2]

Fixed the permissions (for all calibre files there); run kbuildsycoca4 again; logged out and in again -> Big disappointment; still not working.

Then I came up with the approach, described below "Short story".

[kovidgoyal]

As I said, calibre does not install the desktop files itself, it uses xdg-desktop-menu to install them. Therefore, it has no control over file permissions. If you think xdg-desktop-menu should work differently feel free to file a bug report with your distro/freedesktop.org