Opening files from chrome when in fluxbox.

Recently I switched back to using Fluxbox as my window manager and am loving it again. One issue I do have though is that google chrome wont open downloaded files in the programs I would like it to, instead it opens them in firefox, which then gives me a open with dialog. It seems that to find what programs should open which files Chrome hooks into a program called xdg-open which is simply a script that looks up the mime info and opens a program dependant on it. By itself it doesnt seem to do much but when in a desktop environment such as gnome or KDE then it piggybacks onto their settings.

As this behavior was starting to annoy me I looked into what I could do to fix it. It seems that the solution is very easy as long as you have some of gnome installed including gnome-settings-daemon. All you then need to do is start this along with fluxbox and this can be achieved through the fluxbox startup file located in ~/fluxbox/  This is very well documented so you can just follow the instructions which include adding the line before the exec fluxbox which is already in there:

/usr/libexec/gnome-settings-daemon &

This is the case in my Fedora install at least, the path to the executable may be different dependant on distribution. If its a rpm based distribution then you should be able to query the rpmdb with

rpm -ql gnome-settings-daemon