can't change preferences [SOLVED]

Graham Menhennitt graham at menhennitt.com.au
Wed Feb 7 03:16:45 EST 2018


On 05/02/2018 22:54, Geert Janssens wrote:
> Op zondag 4 februari 2018 09:48:49 CET schreef Graham Menhennitt:
>> Hi GnuCashers,
>>
>> I'm running GnuCash 2.6.19 on FreeBSD 11-stable. Everything seems to
>> work correctly except that I can't change any preferences. I try to
>> click on the tick boxes/radio buttons etc. in the Edit Preferences
>> dialog, but nothing happens. It's as if everything is read-only.
>>
>> I presume that the reason for this also causes that it doesn't remember
>> my most recent open files, and it always shows tips on startup even
>> though I unticked the "show tips" box.
>>
>> Does anybody have any clues, please?
>>
> The gnucash preferences are stored in gsettings. This is a generic preferences
> store that requires a platform dependent backend. On linux this backend is
> dconf. I presume this is also what would be used on FreeBSD. Can you check if
> dconf is installed (and used) ?

Thanks for replying, Geert.

I can run the dconf command. But I can't seem to get anything out of it:

     dconf list /
     dconf list /org.gnucash/
     dconf list /org/gnucash/

all print nothing.

I can see /usr/local/share/glib-2.0/schemas/ contains lots of files 
including 16 org.gnucash.* ones. I can also see the file 
gschemas.compiled in that directory and it has the same date/time as the 
gnucash files.

I built GnuCash from the FreeBSD port system using the guile2 option 
(after having used older versions of GnuCash and guile for many years). 
Maybe that's when I started having this problem. I can try switching 
back to guile1, or even going back to an older version of GnuCash.

Hang on, I'm going to try something...

... ok, back again and solved it!

It appears that my dconf settings were corrupt. I installed dconf-editor 
and, when I ran it and tried to edit something, it said:

     (dconf-editor:25665): dconf-WARNING **: failed to commit changes to 
dconf: 
GDBus.Error:org.gtk.GDBus.UnmappedGError.Quark._g_2dfile_2derror_2dquark.Code17: 
Cannot open dconf database: invalid gvdb header

So I renamed ~/.config/dconf to ~/.config/dconf_save and tried it again, 
and it worked. And now I can change the GnuCash preferences too! So, 
it's all working now.

Thanks again for your help,
     Graham


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