More on update-alternatives

It appears that update-alternatives is a very handy facility in Debian derivatives for keeping track of the preferred application for specific tasks.

This seems to be a much SAFER than Windows way of handling things (i.e., let the application try to set itself as the default handler--a la IE vs. Firefox, whatever audio player you use, etc...).

This also seems to be much cleaner than what I've experienced in the past with Linux--maybe trying to override one browser with another, creating a random soft link, etc...

All such alternatives can be seen in the /etc/alternatives directory. On a Kubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) box, one finds among the alternatives java, pager, x-terminal-emulator, x-window-manager, and x-www-browser. Some alternatives are used to point to specific versions of a program.

"update-alternatives --display " will display information about which alternative is selected.

"update-alternatives --list " will list alternatives.

"update-alternatives --config " allows the selection of a specific alternative.

The files which control the list of alternatives are in /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives.