Thoughts Too Large to Post Elsewhere

Use ROX? Do you have a particular type of file that you love dearly and would like to see differentiated from other file types by its own awesome icon? Well, you’ve come to the right place! Today, we are going to talk about adding new, custom MIME file types in Puppy Linux.

“But, I use a different type of Linux. Will these instructions help me?” you ask. The short answer is, “No.” The Puppy distro is lacking a particular command that your distro likely has. If you are using anything but Puppy Linux, I advise you to go here and follow those instructions.

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At this point, I should be talking with a bunch of Puppy Linux users. These instructions are purely devoted to creating a MIME file type for the sole purpose of assigning a custom icon. If you want your special file type to open up a program, you will need to look elsewhere.

As you can see, in my eBooks folder, I have a bunch of gear-shaped icons for .mobi files.

The .mobi files are MobiPocket Reader files that I can read on Puppy Linux using FBReader, Calibre, or on my phone (Nokia E72) with MobiPocket Reader for Nokia E72. I mainly read these files on my phone. However, I’m not loving the gear shapes and want to replace it with a MobiPocket specific icon.

The first step is to open ROX and navigate over to /usr/share/mime and right click on the file that says “globs”. From there, you are going to choose, “Open As Text”.

You should now have your globs file open in a text editor and it should look something like this:

Now you are going to want to scroll all the way down to the bottom to add the following information:

application/x-{your extension}:*.{your extension}

Where you have replaced the {your extension} with the actual extension you are looking to iconify. In my case, it was “mobi”.

Now this is really important!!!! Make sure that there is a blank line underneath the one you just added. If you fail to do this, nothing will work.

In my case, the blank line was line 753. Now click “Save”.

At this point, head back over to your ROX file window and click on the Rescan button. You’ll notice that your file icons have changed to something else from what they used to be.

Now we are getting somewhere!

The final step is to simply assign a new icon. Have you found one that you plan to use? If not, do that now, then come back here to read the next steps. Don’t worry. I’ll wait.

So, you’ve found the icon of your dreams? Excellent. Let’s assign it.

Right click on any of the files that you want reiconified and select Set Icon ….

Your next step is to make sure that the option of For all files of type is the option selected. This is not the default option, so you will need to do something.

After that, open a different ROX window and navigate to where your new icon image resides. Simply drag and drop the icon file into the space that says Drop an icon file here.

And as if by magic, your new icon will be applied to the types of files you wish it to be applied to.

You are now armed and dangerous. Go forth and iconify!

Did you find this tutorial helpful? Say, “Thanks!”