Ubuntu – My dconf/gsettings installation is broken. How to fix it without Ubuntu reinstall

dconfgsettings

I run Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS x64 in VirtualBox. After one very unfortunate misclick (reset saved state instead of load saved state) I got a very annoying problem.

Almost all applications (unity, synaptic, gedit, etc.) print on start:

Using the 'memory' GSettings backend.  Your settings will not be saved or shared with other applications.

And all GUI settings reset after reboot.

Another symptom:

$ GSETTINGS_BACKEND=dconf dconf-editor
(dconf-editor:2353): GLib-GIO-WARNING **: Can't find module 'dconf' specified in GSETTINGS_BACKEND
GLib-GIO-Message: Using the 'memory' GSettings backend.  Your settings will not be saved or shared with other applications

But /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gio/modules/libdconfsettings.so is present.

What I tried (and it didn't help):

sudo apt-get install -f --reinstall dconf-tools libdconf0 libdconf-dbus-1-0 dconf-service
Build dconf-0.5 from sources and make install it
Create empty user profile and start programs there

I have to keep current Ubuntu installation so a complete reinstall is not an option for me.

How can I fix it?

Best Answer

This can also happen if you have PATH conflicts with a Python enviroment manager like Anaconda.

Make sure to run which gsettings before getting too deep. If that doesn't print /usr/bin/gsettings and instead something like /home/{username}/anaconda3/bin/gsettings you probably have something .profile/.bashrc/.zshrc like:

export PATH=$HOME/anaconda3/bin:$PATH

Change it to:
export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/anaconda3/bin

Appending instead of preprending to the PATH variable will solve your issue, but be aware that anything in your system bin, or other PATH locations, will supersede your anaconda3/bin.

Another option would be to alias /usr/bin/gsettings:

alias sys-gsettings=/usr/bin/gsettings
sys-gsettings get org.gnome.todo view

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to install a Gsettings Schema without root privileges

You can copy and compile your Gsettings Schemas to a user-writable directory:

$ cp com.companyname.appname ~/schemas/
$ glib-compile-schemas ~/schemas/

The tricky bit is to configure the application to use that particular directory. There are two ways to do this:

With the GSETTINGS_SCHEMA_DIR environment variable:
```
$ GSETTINGS_SCHEMA_DIR=~/schemas/ ./example.py
```

Or using GSettingsSchemaSource and GSettingSchema objects:

If you have access to the source code of your program, you can modify it to load compiled schemas from any directory. Here's how would do it in Python, although you could do this in any programming language with GObject introspection:

schema_source = Gio.SettingsSchemaSource.new_from_directory(
    os.path.expanduser("~/schemas"),
    Gio.SettingsSchemaSource.get_default(),
    False,
)
schema = schema_source.lookup('com.companyname.appname', False)
settings = Gio.Settings.new_full(schema, None, None)
settings.set_boolean('mybool', True)

References:

Ubuntu – How to read GSettings values from a filesystem backup

Suggested by a community member in the GNOME IRC channel:

Copy the old ~/.config/dconf/user to /tmp/dconf/user.

Export the data to a human-readable format:

XDG_CONFIG_HOME=/tmp dconf dump / > old-gsettings-data.txt

Optionally edit the data in a text editor and load it into the current database with dconf load.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to install a Gsettings Schema without root privileges

References:

Ubuntu – How to read GSettings values from a filesystem backup

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