GNOME doesn’t detect MIME types anymore

After a recent upgrade (Gentoo being Gentoo) my GNOME desktop stopped detecting file MIME types. All files in Nautilus whould show as plain files with no type icons, and all application associations have stopped working.

I tried re-emerging a bunch of stuff like gnome-mime-data and mime-data and nothing helped.

After lots of research, I did this (as regular user):
$ update-mime-database .local/share/mime
This actually worked! It threw out some errors regarding specific files, but it did work! I’m not sure what it does, but after restarting Nautilus (by doing the usual killall nautilus) I got my desktop properly working again.

Ahh.. got to love Gentoo - no other distro gives you these challenges and the satisfaction that comes with solving them - or as Gentoo folks say, “If it’s broken - fix it. If it ain’t broken, break it” ;)

3 Responses to “GNOME doesn’t detect MIME types anymore”

  1. June 27th, 2008 | 17:53

    I solved the same problem by downgrade x11-misc/shared-mime-info to 0.30 and masket the 0.40 version.

  2. tom
    July 13th, 2008 | 05:56

    Thanks for this. I ran into the same exact thing.

  3. July 23rd, 2008 | 11:03

    Thanks. Saved my day.

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