Re: [Evolution] How to make Evolution remember its main window size--revisited

[George Reeke <reeke mail rockefeller edu>]

Dear Matthew, Suman et al.,
On Wed, 2009-06-10 at 09:05 +0530, Suman Manjunath wrote:
> 2009/6/10 Matthew Barnes <mbarnes 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