Several GTK-based applications are suddenly showing white icons with a red cross inside. Now what!

The update of the “shared-mime-info” package to version 0.70  in slackware-current seems to have changed the mime database format.

Slackware will automatically update the system-wide mime info database on every boot. It runs the command

update-mime-database /usr/share/mime

However, there is also a per-user mime database which is not being updated automatically. The result being that several of your GTK-based applications (such as pidgin and wicd) can not display their icons correctly and worse, starting XFCE will be disastrous because your (now) incompatible mime info database will destroy the XFCE menu and task bar.

Luckily, the solution is easy! You need to run this command once, for every user that logs on to your Slackware-current box:

update-mime-database ~/.local/share/mime

You can add this command to your “/etc/profile” script (which automatically fixes this issue system-wide for all your user accounts) or to your own ~/.profile script (you may have to create this file if it does not yet exist).

In theory, you do not need to run the command more than once but adding it to your profile will guard you against future incompatibilities like this one.

Eric