One of our users has complained that the local SL30x Thunderbird 
installation was unable to open URLs.

Excuse me if this is wrong, but it does not seem to have got an airing 
on the SL users list, so I thought I'd raise it here.

Our user pointed me to a posting on the Fermi Linux users list:

http://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind0508&L=LINUX-USERS&P=R5027

But this workaround takes away the user option, and enforces everyone 
to use the same browser...

However, google pointed me to an item at CERN:

http://linux.web.cern.ch/linux/news.shtml
(search for the string "gconftool" to find the item).

This proposes the gconftool-2 command for CLI setting the url-handler
correctly.  (Or can be done via the GUI).

I tried the proposed CLI command for myself, and it seemed to do the 
trick.

The CERN item seems to be a proper *user* workaround, but every user 
would need to carry it out for themselves. I can't help thinking there 
surely ought to be an effective solution in terms of CLI setting a 
system default (leaving it open for the minority of users who wanted 
to use a different browser, to set it for themselves in the way 
that's described at CERN).

I'm not familiar enough with GNOME and gconf, but I guess it would be 
done somewhere in the /etc/gconf/* hierarchy?

regards

--