When gnome loses all your settings (Shallow Thoughts)

When gnome loses all your settings

This has bitten me too many times, and I always forget how to recover. This time I'm saving it here for posterity.

The scene: you wanted to check something, perhaps a window manager theme or a font setting or something, and innocently ran some gnome app even though you aren't running a gnome desktop.

Immediately thereafter, you notice that something has changed disastrously in your gtk apps, even apps that were already running and working fine. Maybe it's your keyboard theme, or maybe fonts or colors.

Now you're screwed: your previous configuration files like ~/.gtkrc-2.0 don't matter any more, because gnome has taken over and Knows What's Best For You. How do you fix it?

Don't bother looking for apps that start with gnome-- or gtk-. That would be too obvious. You might think that gnome-control-center would have something related ... but mwa-ha-ha, you'd be wrong!

The solution, it turns out, is gconf-editor, an app obviously modeled after regedit from everyone's favorite user interface designer, Microsoft.

In the case of key theme, you'll find it in desktop->gnome->interface->gtk_key_theme.

Tags: linux, gnome
[ 17:39 Jul 22, 2005    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]