Mail apps won't launch browsers

Question

i've tried thunderbird and sylpheed. they give a popup dialog that says "could not start Gnome browser... unable to determine address of the message bus." it's the same whether they're trying to open firefox, epiphany, or galeon (btw, the gtk2/gnome interface really sucks in that you can't just enter a pathname to an app manually, but you have to search all over the place if you don't know where ti is, and drill down to the application with mouse clicks )
i get the same thing when i try to run epiphany from the command line, but firefox and galeon both work from there. epiphany launches from cli if i put "dbus-launch" in front of the command. i tried adding that into the thunderbird mimetypes file, but it didn't work.
dbus is running, does anyone know what's wrong, or, more importantly, how to fix this dbus problem? :?:

Answer 1

cactus wrote:you can set a default browser in the gnome preferences.. preferred applications.
is that what you mean?
i don't know, i use xfce. i'll try changing that in gnome and see if it works, thanks.