Does ubuntu have a magic tool to tell me which programs will open my
file, yet?
You may have xdg-open and/or gnome-open that are somehat akin to
Window's start.exe and Mac OS X's open(1) in that they will run an
appropriate program based on the filename specified. I think they
only know about programs that you already have installed on your
machine.
There's a command-not-found package in Ubuntu that hooks into the
shell and knows about packages in the repository that you haven't
installed. It will say
"The program 'foo' is currently not installed, you can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install foo"
or
"The program 'bar' can be found in the following packages:
* bar
* bar-ng
Try: sudo apt-get install <package>"
as appropriate, replacing the standard shell message. I don't know of
a solution that combines both bits of functionality and works in both
the shell and the Graphical Desktop Environment. It would be cool if
there were one.
