Rated 5 out of 5 stars

by lihfori on May 7, 2011 · permalink

Hi Paolo.I was reading a post over (http://www.mozdev.org/pipermail/maf/2010-March/000431.html) and I had the same problem.

So to solve this I created a XML MIME file to register Maff MIME type and make Linux recognize maff files like maff files in fact, differentiating them from zip files, because actually Linux systems recognizes maff files as ordinary zip files, and handle as so, if anyone associates maff files with firefox, zip files will be associated too, what is very annoying.

With registration of MIME type we can associate maff files with Firefox without disturbing zip files association, which is a blessing help.The required steps are:First create a empty plain text, now paste the following content on it:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info">
<mime-type type="application/x-maff">
<comment>Maff File</comment>
<comment xml:lang="pt">Ficheiro Maff</comment>
<comment xml:lang="pt_BR">Arquivo Maff</comment>
<glob pattern="*.maff"/>
</mime-type>
</mime-info>

This content describes maff files and maff extention to MIME engine used by Gnome, KDE, Rox etc.

That done, save this file with name and extention maff.xml , now with root privileges paste maff.xml file you just created under bellow folder:

/usr/share/mime/packages

That folder is apropriate in Linux to locate xml MIME type files we created.

That done, run the following command to update MIME type database:

update-mime-database /usr/share/mime

That done, restart X, you can restart system or if you prefer to kill X use the command: killall Xorg

After restart X maff files will be recognized as maff files dissassociated from zip files, now you can associate maff itself with firefox and zip files will not be associated togother anymore.

Lines like <comment xml:lang="pt_BR">Arquivo Maff</comment> are basically translation of line <comment>Maff File</comment> who serves like a description label of MIME for human reading, then anyone can add specific translation to respective native languages in native language characters, if know what are doing, as I'm brazilian I added european portuguese and brazilian portuguese translation, so don't be afraid, if I knew more languages​​, I would include, but I do not know, So will be better to leave that to those who knows it with property.

For further info about MIME association in Linux you can read the official shared MIME spec page over (http://standards.freedesktop.org/shared-mime-info-spec/shared-mime-info-spec-latest.html)

Now Paolo, two things lasts like problems, first we Linux users need official png artwork icons to emblem (personificate) maff files in Linux systems, I looked over project's page but don't find any artwork, so any direction about this would be cool.

And the second issue is even when maff are set as default saving format we Linux users still get ".html" extention piece name saved before maff extention, so we get things like:

mypage.html.maff

That is very boring, to make me well understandable have any solution to make it save files like:

mypage.maff without ".html" piece.

PS: I'm not an english speaker as you can see, so write here was a great sacrifice. So if killed the english give a break, was necessary.