Can't update preferences and can't get rid of Welcome dialog in Gnucash 2.4.7 (OS X 2.6.8)

[John Ralls]

On Aug 3, 2011, at 1:51 AM, prl wrote:

> On 3/08/11 2:09, John Ralls wrote:
>> Sorry, I misunderstood that [creation of ~/.gconf] from your original.
> No problem
>> None of my ideas for replicating the problem are working; No matter what I do, GConf creates its keys in ~/.gconf.
>> You could try running Gnucash from Terminal. Maybe some extra error messages will show up. (Make sure you have a big enough scrollback buffer or redirect the error stream so that you don't lose the top of the output.)
>> 
>> Regards,
>> John Ralls
> Running Gnucash from Terminal surprisingly doesn't give a large number of error messages:
> 
> Cambyses:~ prl$ /Applications/Gnucash.app/Contents/MacOS/Gnucash
> No GDK Window
> No NSWindow
> Cambyses:~ prl$
> 
> And Gnucash otherwise runs the same as when I run it from the Finder.
> 
> However if I run /Applications/Gnucash.app/Contents/MacOS/Gnucash-bin instead, it does give a popup window that says: "An error occurred while loading or saving configuration information for Gnucash-bin. ..." (Why do GUI designers always seem to make error popup text non selectable/copyable?) and it offers in another popup to fix the problem: "The configuration data used to specify default values for GnuCash cannot be found in the default system locations". However, I'm not sure whether these are symptoms of my problem or are simply happening because Gnucash-bin isn't being run with suitable environment variables, suitable arguments or other support processes (like gconfd).
> 
> When run this way I do get an error message when I tell the popup that's offering to fix the problem to simply quit:
> 
> Cambyses:~ prl$ /Applications/Gnucash.app/Contents/MacOS/Gnucash-bin
> 
> (Gnucash-bin:966): qof-CRITICAL **: qof_object_shutdown: assertion `object_is_initialized == TRUE' failed
> Cambyses:~ prl$

Yeah, the launch script is there for a reason. It launches dbus-daemon and sets a bunch of environment variables so that Gnucash can find its libraries.

The interesting thing here is that there aren't any errors from GConf when you did use the launcher script. Did they show up in Console? I suppose ~/.gconf is still unpopulated.

What does "echo $HOME" print? What did you edit gconf/2/path to say?

Regards,
John Ralls