How to fix the KDE error: Could not find mime type application/octet-stream

Last Updated: 2010-04-10

Everytime I tried to open any KDE application that is trying to read from my hard drive I received an error message box stating "Could not find mime type application/octet-stream". The message appeared twice and never came back as long as I kept the program running.
I think I caused the problem when I was changing how Konqueror is supposed to open PHP files, but I'm not sure.

Here is how to get rid of the message and as far as I can tell, fix the problem.
Open a console and type:

skylinux@2of9:~> grep -ri 'octet-stream' ~/.kde/share/*
/home/skylinux/.kde/share/mimelnk/application/octet-stream.desktop:MimeType=application/octet-stream

Here, /home/skylinux/.kde/share/mimelnk/application/octet-stream.desktop is the offending file. A quick delete took care of my problem and I have not had any negative effects from deleting the file.

skylinux@2of9:~> rm /home/skylinux/.kde/share/mimelnk/application/octet-stream.desktop
skylinux@2of9:~>

User Comments:

Title: That did it
Posted By: Dustin On: 2010-04-06 10:12
Running: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)

I did as you said except I just navigated to the file in konqueror and deleted it.
Problem seems to be solved! Excellent! This error was also preventing "My Computer" from opening from the desktop link. And it was annoying as hell.
I think the "octet-stream.desktop" file may have something to do with VMware because when I hovered over it, the pop-up said it was a vmdk file which is a format used by VMware. I only have VMware Player and VMware Tools on my PCLinuxOS with only 1 virtual machine running WinXP.
I'll bet the file has something to do with host-guest copy and paste because it never started happening until I did this.
Thanks for the fix, Skylinux!

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