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

[George Reeke <reeke mail rockefeller edu>]

On Thu, 2009-06-11 at 18:59 -0700, N B Day wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-06-11 at 18:08 -0400, George Reeke wrote:
>
> <lots of deletion>
> > 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
> I think at this point I'd leave Gnome entirely for TWM or KDE or
> whatever else you have on your machine, shut down gconftool-2 with
> "gconftool-2 --shutdown", do the same for evolution, "evolution
> --force-shutdown",  and then try setting my desired values with
> gconf-editor.
Interesting idea, but no cigar.  I don't have KDE installed, TWM
is installed but I have never used it and when I do try to start
it up it fails with a message that it cannot open the display.
I have no interest in debugging this problem.

Anyway, what reason is there to think gconf-editor would work
outside the gnome environment for which it was designed?  This
seems a bit of a stab in the dark.

I noticed a similar new thread on this topic today.  Perhaps
someone can answer my original question:  where are the defaults
stored?  I would be much happier bold-force editing them in 
a few minutes than all this time trying to get fancy Windows-
imitating tools to work that I really am not interested in.

Just in case anybody is interested, I tried editing the
$(HOME)/.gconf/apps/evolution/shell/view_defaults/%gconf.xml
file where these parameters seem to be stored when the window
is changed with the mouse, then setting it to be unmodifiable
with chattr +i.  Guess what happened?  I exited gnome and
restarted, the evolution window again came up small, and now
there was a new file called %gconf.xml.new in this directory
with the small height and width, and the old file with my
settings of course still there because it could not be touched.
So some programmer somewhere really very badly did not want
me to modify this file.  I really would like to understand
the reasoning behind this.  If I made the .new file
untouchable, would it make a .new2?  How deep would this go?
Where are the numbers coming from that it keeps writing into
this file?

Just curious,
George Reeke