I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 but with a customised desktop setup which is using gnome-session, the ubuntu dock and "move clock" extension (intended to fix the excesses of both Canonical and Gnome).
I was quite happily running this on two systems but had to force power off on one because my screen wasn't responsive (screen res mode issues after running an emulator under wine). To my horror this broke many of my customisations, and I was unable to fix them via the Gnome Settings and Tweak Tool.
I had to "rm ~/.config/dconf/user" in order to use Tweak Tool successfully which leads me to suspect that this (binary) file became corrupted.
First Question: is it usual for this file to become corrupted?
I can turn it into a human-readable form by "dconf dump /" it seems.
Second Question: How can I regenerate the binary file "~/.config/dconf/user" from a copy of this dump?
I don't want to manually do all the config if this happens again, and I'm unimpressed that gnome seems to lose its settings.
And where was your backup?
On 29/12/2020 16:27, Steve Mynott wrote:
I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 but with a customised desktop setup which is using gnome-session, the ubuntu dock and "move clock" extension (intended to fix the excesses of both Canonical and Gnome).
I was quite happily running this on two systems but had to force power off on one because my screen wasn't responsive (screen res mode issues after running an emulator under wine). To my horror this broke many of my customisations, and I was unable to fix them via the Gnome Settings and Tweak Tool.
I had to "rm ~/.config/dconf/user" in order to use Tweak Tool successfully which leads me to suspect that this (binary) file became corrupted.
First Question: is it usual for this file to become corrupted?
I can turn it into a human-readable form by "dconf dump /" it seems.
Second Question: How can I regenerate the binary file "~/.config/dconf/user" from a copy of this dump?
I don't want to manually do all the config if this happens again, and I'm unimpressed that gnome seems to lose its settings.
On Tue, 29 Dec 2020 17:33:44 +0000 Huge huge@huge.org.uk allegedly wrote:
And where was your backup?
Ouch.
--------------------------------------------------------------------- Mick Morgan gpg fingerprint: FC23 3338 F664 5E66 876B 72C0 0A1F E60B 5BAD D312 https://baldric.net/about-trivia ---------------------------------------------------------------------
On Tue, 29 Dec 2020 at 18:02, Huge huge@huge.org.uk wrote:
And where was your backup?
On backblaze and google drive using restic with rclone backends.
The question is about gnome desktop settings and their apparent tendency to become corrupted and how to restore from a human-readable version (which I now know).
I assume you don't know the answer to either question which explains your odd and unhelpful response.
So, either you didn't have one, didn't know how to restore it, or tried and it failed. Either way, being rude to me is hardly going to improve matters, is it?
On 29/12/2020 19:05, Steve Mynott wrote:
On Tue, 29 Dec 2020 at 18:02, Huge huge@huge.org.uk wrote:
And where was your backup?
On backblaze and google drive using restic with rclone backends.
The question is about gnome desktop settings and their apparent tendency to become corrupted and how to restore from a human-readable version (which I now know).
I assume you don't know the answer to either question which explains your odd and unhelpful response.
On 29/12/2020 22:25, Huge wrote:
So, either you didn't have one, didn't know how to restore it, or tried and it failed. Either way, being rude to me is hardly going to improve matters, is it?
Could I politely point out something that I'm sure you're aware of: Sometimes the intent of written word on the internet is misinterpreted because of the lack of body language and tone of voice. With the greatest of respect, both the message to which you were replying, *and* your initial response to the first question sounded rude *TO ME*. They may not have been intended like that, and I am not intending to be rude myself, but sometimes inferred rudeness from one generates rudeness from another. So, why not "play nicely everyone"?
The initial question stated that this customised config was used on two machines and I can easily see a requirement where, having made specific fiddly changes on one machine, it would nice if these changes could be dumped to a "differences" file, shifted to the other machine and then imported, rather than repeating a the sequence of fiddly changes.
That could be why this question was asked.
Steve
On 29/12/2020 19:05, Steve Mynott wrote:
The question is about gnome desktop settings and their apparent tendency to become corrupted and how to restore from a human-readable version (which I now know).
I'd be interested to know how you go from human readable back to dconf.
Quite why UI designers decided that nice editable INI files or even XML files were bad, and instead they should create a proprietary registry-like config structure (dconf, gconf etc), editable only manually through an equivalent of regedit, escapes me!
Steve
On Wed, Dec 30, 2020 at 12:46:37AM +0000, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk typed:
Quite why UI designers decided that nice editable INI files or even XML files were bad, and instead they should create a proprietary registry-like config structure (dconf, gconf etc), editable only manually through an equivalent of regedit, escapes me!
I much prefer the approach of something like fluxbox which has particularly clear config files.
Really all gnome does seems to is to serialise the current state of the UI (and much else as well!) into a binary file.
The file (a single point of failure) is constantly updated with various pieces of data. It's not a good candidate from restoring from a backup since it contains timestamps for things like updates.
I also noticed that settings are kept for software which has been removed and there are settings for things like SuSE's YaST (on ubuntu!).
It's not very UNIX like and more like Windows as you say!
-- Steve Mynott steve.mynott@gmail.com cv25519/ECF8B611205B447E091246AF959E3D6197190DD5
Steve Mynott steve.mynott@gmail.com a écrit
I can turn it into a human-readable form by "dconf dump /" it seems.
Second Question: How can I regenerate the binary file "~/.config/dconf/user" from a copy of this dump?
I think it can be done with: dconf load / < dumpfile.ini
But I don't think it's normal to corrupt the settings and I don't think gnome settings are used by any of the servers I back up properly for restoration without human intervention, so I have never had to test it in reality!
On Wed, Dec 30, 2020 at 01:26:31PM +0000, MJ Ray typed:
Steve Mynott steve.mynott@gmail.com a écrit
I can turn it into a human-readable form by "dconf dump /" it seems.
Second Question: How can I regenerate the binary file "~/.config/dconf/user" from a copy of this dump?
I think it can be done with: dconf load / < dumpfile.ini
Yeah that's what I was after!
I ended up being more specific and just using
$ dconf dump /org/gnome/ (trailing slash needed!)
to dump out gnome settings only
There was still cruft there since it stores things like the last notifications! It really puts the kitchen sink in there!
Also it's possible to reset with "dconf reset -f /".
You can also use "dconf-editor" but I prefered to use things like vim and vimdiff on the exported text files.
But I don't think it's normal to corrupt the settings and I don't think gnome settings are used by any of the servers I back up properly for restoration without human intervention, so I have never had to test it in reality!
I think the corruption does occur sometimes since I saw quite a few complaints in search results dating back years. It's annoying the UI doesn't report the corruption error and it's only visible via greyed out options.
The fact a single file is written to constantly probably increases the risk of corruption. I wonder if it was triggered by my system constantly changing graphics mode (for wine emulation).
I don't run gnome or any desktop on servers.
-- Steve Mynott steve.mynott@gmail.com cv25519/ECF8B611205B447E091246AF959E3D6197190DD5
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