Gnome and MIME types

I'm having a hard time getting solid MIME Types of various files. On my Ubuntu/Apache2/PHP5 system, I first attempted to install fileInfo. That didn't go so well (on Safari even running "$finfo = finfo_open(FILEINFO_MIME);" causes it to complain that it lost the network connection; Firefox prompts me to download the file_ and seeing as it is not really ready for release, I thought I should stay away from that. I then tried running "system("file -i -m /usr/share/docs/mim file")" which worked, but file doens't provide very good mime types -- all Microsoft Office Documents returned nothing, for example. I then stumbled upon gnomevfs-info that provided the information I wanted. I don't know what mime database it is using (couldn't find it) but it sure seemed more complete than anything else I had used. Problem is, I can't seem to run it from within a PHP script (system, exec, etc). I used the full path (/usr/bin/gnamevfs-info) so I don't believe that to be the problem, and the page has no errors (I am using error_reporting(E_ALL)). Any tips or suggestions? Thanks! Nate