mime.cache makes .pdf files show up as "application/octet-stream"; won't open in Evince

[Rob Speer]

Binary package hint: shared-mime-info

On today's Karmic Beta, I am unable to open .pdf files. Evince complains that "File type unknown (application/octet-stream) is not supported".

Evince bug #187225 says that this is a shared-mime-info problem, which is why I'm reporting it here. That bug was closed after the reporter discovered a workaround, but it is still a bug that prevents an important use of the operating system for a very unintuitive reason.

The workaround is to delete ~/.local/share/mime/mime.cache, and that worked for me as well. Perhaps an upgrade script for shared-mime-info should do that.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Wed Oct 7 03:47:22 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: shared-mime-info 0.70-0ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-12.39-generic
SourcePackage: shared-mime-info
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-12-generic i686

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported, but feel free to report any other bugs you find.