Making Konsole the Default Terminal in Linux Mint 12

Last week I upgraded from Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) to Linux Mint 12 (Lisa). One thing that bothered me in Lisa was the lack of ability to select a terminal in the Preferred Applications settings; something that was available in Natty. My preference is to use Gnome Classic and to have Konsole as my default terminal.

Although not explicitly available in the settings, setting a preferred terminal was not as difficult as I thought it would be. Gnome uses GConf2 to handle these kind of settings. Using the gconf-editor on Natty, I could see that there was a setting entry for a terminal at /desktop/gnome/applications/terminal

On disk, this setting is stored in

~/.gconf/desktop/gnome/applications/terminal/%gconf.xml

In Lisa, there is no path to this file on disk, so lets sort that out. First install konsole, or your terminal of choice

sudo apt-get install konsole

Find the location of the konsole command. This is needed below:


noel@behemoth ~ $ which konsole
/usr/bin/konsole

Now create the setting

mkdir -p ~/.gconf/desktop/gnome/applications/terminal/
vim ~/.gconf/desktop/gnome/applications/terminal/%gconf.xml


In Vim, paste in the following text and save (:wq). 

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<gconf>
  <entry name="exec" mtime="1337527678" type="string">
    <stringvalue>/usr/bin/konsole</stringvalue>
  </entry>
  <entry name="exec_arg" mtime="1336942220" type="string">
    <stringvalue>-e</stringvalue>
  </entry>
</gconf>

With that in place, you should see your favorite terminal used with the Launch Terminal keyboard binding:

System Settings > Keyboard > Shortcuts 

Within Nautilus, the "Open in terminal" still launches the Gnome terminal. I suspect this is because Nautilus is a compiled dependency.