Dear Matthew, Suman et al., On Wed, 2009-06-10 at 09:05 +0530, Suman Manjunath wrote: > 2009/6/10 Matthew Barnes <mbar...@redhat.com>: > > On Tue, 2009-06-09 at 17:43 -0400, George Reeke wrote: > >> Thanks for your suggestion. For me, it doesn't work. > >> I killed evolution, changed the height and width in gconf editor in > >> two places, since the names are not unambiguous: > >> apps/evolution/mail/message_window and > >> apps/evolution/shell/view_defaults > >> Restarted evolution: New sizes took effect. > >> Shut down evolution, rebooted computer--old small size is back again. > > > > Check your ~/.gconf directory permissions (including subdirectories) and > > make sure they are writable. What you describe sounds like the GConf > > daemon process (gconfd-2) is unable to write its in-memory settings to > > disk when the desktop session is ending, which would explain why your > > settings are retained during the session but lost on reboot. > > Unlikely. IMO, you need to set the values as default after changing them. > > Open gconf-editor, change the values of view_default sizes, right > click on those values and click on "Set as default" (and/or "Set as > mandatory"). These values should be retained over multiple sessions. > > -Suman
First, my reply to Matthew: Yes, every component of the path is writeable. Like I said, if I make the %gconf.xml file nonwriteable to try to save my hand-edited changes, it changes back to writeable and writes the small window size back in there, so I guess there is no way it could in fact be nonwriteable, even on purpose. Actually, I am tempted to change the ownership to root and then make it nonwriteable and see whether my poor little changes will stay where I put them. My reply to Suman: Thanks for pointing out that "save as default" item. It is so obscure on that right-click menu that I never saw it. Stupid me. Anyway, that is no help. When I try it, I get a long error message, reproduced below for anybody interested. Here are my responses to the suggestions given in that error message: "...attempted to change an aspect of your configuration that your system administrator or operating system vendor does not allow you to change." I AM the system administrator. I didn't tell it to forbid me to change anything. I doubt RedHat did. (1) Path /etc/gconf/2/path is there and contents look reasonable as far as I can tell given no documentation. I looked in all the files pointed to by the configuration files in that path, and none have any actual numerical values for any height or width parameters. (2) "somehow we mistakenly created two gconfd processes". BINGO. Actually, there are no gconfd processes running, but there is a gconfd-2 and a gconf-editor when I am trying to edit. I rebooted and found out that gconfd-2 comes up as soon as I start my gnome session, without my doing anything except to run ps in a terminal window. That is apparently the gconfd-2 that Matthew referred to. I guess it is supposed to be running, but anyway, if I kill it and run the gconf editor and make my height and width changes again, still I get this same error message when I try to make them the defaults. Evolution again comes up small, so this thing about two processes is apparently irrelevant. (3 and 4) Something about NFS locking. There is no NFS access involved here. So I am still stumped. Gee, you would think if a user did something as simple as change a window size (to a nonridiculous value that works) it would get written in a configuration file somewhere and just stay that way. I'm beginning to think those built-in defaults are hard coded in the source somewhere, since I can't find them and nobody seems to be able to tell me where they come from. Any more ideas or suggestions? Thanks, George Reeke Here is the text of my error message: The application "gconf-editor" attempted to change an aspect of your configuration that your system administrator or operating system vendor does not allow you to change. Some of the settings you have selected may not take effect, or may not be restored next time you use the application. No database available to save your configuration: Unable to store a value at key '/apps/evolution/shell/view_defaults/height', as the configuration server has no writable databases. There are some common causes of this problem: 1) your configuration path file /etc/gconf/2/ path doesn't contain any databases or wasn't found 2) somehow we mistakenly created two gconfd processes 3) your operating system is misconfigured so NFS file locking doesn't work in your home directory or 4) your NFS client machine crashed and didn't properly notify the server on reboot that file locks should be dropped. If you have two gconfd processes (or had two at the time the second was launched), logging out, killing all copies of gconfd, and logging back in may help. If you have stale locks, remove ~/.gconf*/*lock. Perhaps the problem is that you attempted to use GConf from two machines at once, and ORBit still has its default configuration that prevents remote CORBA connections - put "ORBIIOPIPv4=1" in /etc/orbitrc. As always, check the user.* syslog for details on problems gconfd encountered. There can only be one gconfd per home directory, and it must own a lockfile in ~/.gconfd and also lockfiles in individual storage locations such as ~/.gconf _______________________________________________ Evolution-list mailing list Evolution-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-list