simon.schönbeck.dk

Tag: Fedora

  • Firefox not opening mailto links in Flatpak Thunderbird

    Using Fedora Kinoite Thunderbird comes in a Flatpak. This caused me issues with mailto links in Firefox not opening Thunderbird’s new email window.

    Usually just setting Thunderbird as the default email client inside Thunderbird’s settings or KDE’s default applications would have worked. Even selecting Thunderbird inside the Firefox file handler applications settings would have done the job. However mailto links did nothing but open up the application selector in Firefox which did not work.

    The first two places were already set correctly (in Thunderbird and KDE) so not much more to do there. As I cannot directly select Thunderbird’s binary since it is a Flatpak, I tried to get Firefox to open the Flatpak binary instead and somehow customise the command being run.

    There was just no way to customise the command through its interface, unless I fiddled with handlers.json directly in my Firefox profile directory. I tried a few combinations and no dice. I was also still reluctant to believe that all other users would go through this mess just to get mailto links working which is such a basic feature.

    The most annoying part was that XDG actually returned Thunderbird as the default handler for mailto links:

    $ xdg-mime query default x-scheme-handler/mailto
    org.mozilla.Thunderbird.desktop

    But checking my ~/.config/mimeapps.list file revealed that there was no mailto handler defined. Adding the corresponding entries finally fixed the issue:

    [Added Associations]
    x-scheme-handler/mailto=org.mozilla.Thunderbird.desktop;

    [Default Applications]
    x-scheme-handler/mailto=org.mozilla.Thunderbird.desktop;

    Glad that I got it working but still not satisfied that this was really the way to go, so I decided to start from scratch.

    I went back to KDE’s System Settings>Apps & Windows>Default Applications>Email client. Despite having Thunderbird already selected I went and selected Other… instead. Here I could select Thunderbird again but interestingly there were more options:

    You will notice in my screen-shot the check-box stating “Remember application association for all files of type “x-scheme-handler/mailto“. This check-box once checked actually updates the same ~/.config/mimeapps.list file with the previous entries I mentioned earlier.

    So apparently this is an option which is not enabled by default when just selecting Thunderbird in the default applications list. Why not having mailto links working by default in KDE is a conundrum.

    I am sure there are edge cases not wanting mailto links to open the default email client, but I would assume the vast majority of users expect this behaviour of the default email client. What is the point otherwise of selecting a default application?

  • Fedora’s Thunderbird Flatpak shows generic Wayland “W” icon in KDE Plasma

    Just a little annoying issue that has buggered me for many months without any solution in the updates.

    When launching the latest Fedora version of Thunderbird Flatpak (128.6.0esr), it does not display its usual stylised blue swallow icon, but instead the generic yellow “W” icon of Wayland.

    This system runs Fedora Kinoite so the bug probable does not affect a RPM installation of Thunderbird. Additionally, there is also a Flatpak version of Thunderbird in Flathub which I have not tested whether this bug is present or not.

    This issue appears to be due to how the Thunderbird Flatpak is packaged. Specifically, the Fedora provided Flatpak is not setting the expected desktop file metadata when it launches under Wayland. As a result, KDE Plasma falls back to the generic “W” icon for the running window, even though the menu and pinned icon are correct.

    There is a specific commit to the underlying Flatpak container.yaml which may be responsible for this bug. The changing of the name string from “org.mozilla.thunderbird” to “net.thunderbird.Thunderbird“. This hint is also what is used to work around the bug:

    1. Start by opening Thunderbird
    2. Press Alt+F3
    3. Select More Actions > Configure Special Application Settings
    4. Add a new property called Desktop file name
    5. Select “Force” in the property drop-down
    6. Change the property value to “org.mozilla.Thunderbird“
    7. Click “OK“

    Now the taskbar icon should be back to the same as the one in the menu, the correct Thunderbird blue swallow icon, with no sight of the wrong yellow Wayland “W” icon.

  • KDE Plasma sunrise (bright) & sunset (dark) theme automatic switch

    Under System Settings > Appearance & Style > Colours & Themes > Night Light in KDE Plasma there is the expected option to automatically switch at specific times between cool and warm colour temperature for the screen. I marked my location on the map and selected Sunset and sunrise at manual location to take care of the switch automatically. This works perfectly!

    For whichever reason, and there is many, KDE Plasma cannot do the same with the bright and dark theme. This is such a miss that one wonders how anything ever gets agreed upon in large open source projects such as KDE in this case. Gnome supports the option as many other.

    As there are more ways than one to skin a cat, I had several choices to work around this missing feature. I was really looking for something quick and dirty, nothing to install and trust, and easy to undo if needed.

    I decided to use the colour temperature as an indicator of when the bright or dark theme was needed. So at 6500 K it was the cool day light temperature and the bright theme should be used. On the contrary anything below this temperature, that is warm night light, should use the dark theme. Then I would simply check for this system value at a set interval and change the theme if it changed. This simple script is placed in the System Settings > System > Autostart section as an Application and it will launch upon boot and run in the background. Copy or download & unzip the below file and remember to make the .sh file executable:

    #!/bin/bash

    current_theme=""

    while true; do
      # Retrieve the current temperature from KWin using dbus-send
      temperature=$(dbus-send --session --dest=org.kde.KWin --type=method_call --print-reply \
        /org/kde/KWin/NightLight org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties.Get string:org.kde.KWin.NightLight string:currentTemperature \
        | grep -oP 'variant\s+uint32\s+\K\d+')

      # Decide the target theme based on the temperature
      if (( temperature == 6500 )); then
        target_theme="org.fedoraproject.fedora.desktop"  # Light theme for == 6500
      elif (( temperature < 6500 )); then
        target_theme="org.kde.breezedark.desktop"  # Dark theme for < 6500
      fi

      # Switch theme only if it's different from the current one
      if [[ "$target_theme" != "$current_theme" ]]; then
        lookandfeeltool -a "$target_theme"
        # Update the current theme to the new one
        current_theme="$target_theme"
        # KDE notification
        notify-send "Theme Switcher" "Switched to $(basename "$target_theme") theme."
      fi

      # Sleep for 15 minutes (900 seconds)
      sleep 900
    done
    Download shell script

  • Empty Trash from the terminal

    For some reason I can not recall I went into my Trash bin on Fedora. There was unsurprisingly a lot of trash!

    I decided to empty the Trash bin but it only succeeded partially. I had a DVD directory that did not want to be deleted. Looking closer at the message it was a permissions error. Not sure how though, since if I did not have permissions to delete the directory from the Trash bin, how on Earth could I have moved it into the Trash bin to start with…!

    Looking around my home directory in the terminal I could not locate the exact spot to manually remove the directory. As always Google came to assistance and brought up a nice forum topic about how to empty the Trash bin in Fedora from the terminal.

    The simplest way would be to run the following command as root:

    rm -rf  ~/.local/share/Trash/files/*

  • Console recursive FTP client

    Sometimes data needs moving from server to server without FXP support. For this task there is nothing simpler than good old FTP.

    What about if you have a large number of subdirectories? As the plain FTP client can not fetch the files recursively shell scripting is usually the solution. But in cases where you do not really know neither the depth of the recursion or the naming convention of the file system structure, an alternative method is needed.

    This method is named NcFTP Client. I got to know about it today as I quickly needed to copy several gigabytes of data spread over several subdirectories and NcFTP did its job flawlessly. I did not even have to install it as Fedora 10 already came with it by default.