Fragmented Development

As someone who doesn't run a full desktop environment like Gnome or KDE, I'm learning a lot of new tricks about the behind-the-scenes stuff that keeps Linux ticking. For instance, my heybuddy links kept opening in Arora somehow - and I didn't really know where to change that. Arora kept closing/crashing immediately after loading a link, so I thought I should probably research that a bit.

It turns out that opening URLs is done by a bash script called 'xdg-open' located at /usr/bin/xdg-open (or at least it is in Ubuntu systems). Since link opening is handled by this script, setting your default browser also requires a little bash stuff.

The way to set a different browser (in my case, Chromium) to be the default for opening links, is to add the following to your '.bashrc' file in your home folder:

export BROWSER=/usr/bin/chromium-browser

A quick note: this only applies to things that use xdg-open to open links. Gnome software uses a Gnome setting, with the same being true for KDE (I think). If you want your default browser changed for them, you'll have to hunt down whatever setting they use.