Mime types (was Trouble downloading OS X version)

[Alex Rice]

On Wednesday, May 28, 2003, at 02:43  PM, Stephen Barncard wrote:

> Your machine is not set up to properly recognize a .dmg file. You can  
> set that up in Internet explorer. IE thinks it is text and is  
> downloading it as such.
>
> In the meantime, control-click on the URL, you will get a contextual  
> menu, and choose 'save to disk'.

In addition to that, the web server configuration can make a difference  
too. The runrev.com webserver is returning a text/plain mime type to  
the browser, which is bound to confuse more than just Internet Explorer.

# curl --head  
http://www.runrev.com/revolution/downloads/distributions/2.0/ 
revolutionosx.dmg
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
...[headers cut]...
Content-Type: text/plain

On the Apache server, I would recommend the following configuration

AddType application/octet-stream dmg

Usually you can just put that into a .htaccess file in your web folder.

That mime type will cause most if not all browsers to treat it as a   
file to download instead of displaying it.

I just checked on some Apple.com downloads on akamai.net and they are  
using application/octet-stream as well.

Alex Rice, Software Developer
Architectural Research Consultants, Inc.
alrice at ARCplanning.com
alrice at swcp.com