How to make Evolution remember its main window size--revisited

[George Reeke]

Dear colleagues,
   There are many postings on this topic in the list archives,
so don't read this if it bores you, but I can't find a usable
answer there, so I will bring it up again with a note on how I
tried and failed to solve the problem, in the hope that this
idea will tickle someone to speak up who has the final little
bit of information we need to defeat this beast.
   (I am stuck at Evolution 2.12.3 due to using RedHat EL 5.3,
gnome-desktop and metacity 2.16.0, but I'm guessing this is the
same in more recent versions judging by the ancient archive
postings.)
   When I start evolution after a reboot, the main window comes
up too small.  I adjust it and it stays that way, even if
restarted, for the rest of the session, but does not remember
between sessions, at least not all the time.
   Taking the attitude that I don't really care if this is an
evolution or a window manager issue, I just wanted to fix it, so
I went poking around in all the hidden files in my home directory,
and in ~/.gconf/apps/evolution/shell/view-defaults there is a
file called %gconf.xml that has entries called 'height' and
'width'.  This seems to be where it stores the window size.
If I kill evolution (with --force-shutdown), edit these entries,
and start evolution up again, most of the time it just resets to
the old small window size and edits these entries back to what
they were.  But strangely, I can find "magic numbers" that are
obeyed and stay put for the rest of the session.  New session--
old numbers back again.  I tried changing the file mode to 444, but
some code somewhere changes it back to 600 and I am again defeated.
   Obviously, what I need to fix this problem without delving into
the code is just to know where the global defaults are stored so I
can edit them.  I looked in /usr/share/evolution (I have root access)
but could not find what I was looking for there.
   So:  Desperate plea:  Does somebody know where the global default
window size is stored, so I and everybody else with this problem can
edit it and not have it automagically turn back to the original small
size??
   Thanks and the best to all,
George Reeke, Ph.D.
Head, Laboratory of Biological Modelling
The Rockefeller University
1230 York Avenue
New York, NY  10065
email:  reeke@...


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[N B Day-3]

On Tue, 2009-06-09 at 12:08 -0400, George Reeke wrote:
....

>    When I start evolution after a reboot, the main window comes
> up too small.  I adjust it and it stays that way, even if
> restarted, for the rest of the session, but does not remember
> between sessions, at least not all the time.
>    Taking the attitude that I don't really care if this is an
> evolution or a window manager issue, I just wanted to fix it, so
> I went poking around in all the hidden files in my home directory,
> and in ~/.gconf/apps/evolution/shell/view-defaults there is a
> file called %gconf.xml that has entries called 'height' and
> 'width'.

Have you tried setting these values with the gconf-editor program?

(Run gconf-editor from a terminal within gnome as yourself).  You'll
find them under /Apps/Evolution.  Maybe hand editing them isn't sticky
for some reason.

regards,


--
N. B. Day
39° 28.3964' North, 119° 48.6346' West, 1403m up
Aurelius up 2:41, 2 users, load average: 0.12, 0.13, 0.07
2.6.27.23-0.1-default x86_64 GNU/Linux openSUSE 11.1 (x86_64)


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[George Reeke]

On Tue, 2009-06-09 at 11:37 -0700, N B Day wrote:

> On Tue, 2009-06-09 at 12:08 -0400, George Reeke wrote:
> ....
> >    When I start evolution after a reboot, the main window comes
> > up too small.  I adjust it and it stays that way, even if
> > restarted, for the rest of the session, but does not remember
> > between sessions, at least not all the time.
> >    Taking the attitude that I don't really care if this is an
> > evolution or a window manager issue, I just wanted to fix it, so
> > I went poking around in all the hidden files in my home directory,
> > and in ~/.gconf/apps/evolution/shell/view-defaults there is a
> > file called %gconf.xml that has entries called 'height' and
> > 'width'.
> Have you tried setting these values with the gconf-editor program?
>
> (Run gconf-editor from a terminal within gnome as yourself).  You'll
> find them under /Apps/Evolution.  Maybe hand editing them isn't sticky
> for some reason.
>
> regards,
>

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.
I will report this as a bug (unless somebody posts a message in the
next day or two that it has been fixed in more recent versions),
but again--can somebody just tell me please where it gets this
default main window size?
Regards,
George Reeke


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[Matthew Barnes]

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.

Matthew Barnes


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[Suman Manjunath-2]

2009/6/10 Matthew Barnes <mbarnes@...>:

> 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
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[George Reeke]

Dear Matthew, Suman et al.,
On Wed, 2009-06-10 at 09:05 +0530, Suman Manjunath wrote:

> 2009/6/10 Matthew Barnes <mbarnes@...>:
> > 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


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[N B Day-3]

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.


--
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39° 28.3964' North, 119° 48.6346' West, 1403m up
Aurelius up 4:02, 1 user, load average: 0.05, 0.07, 0.01
2.6.27.23-0.1-default x86_64 GNU/Linux openSUSE 11.1 (x86_64)


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[George Reeke]

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



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[Michael M. Moore]

On Tue, 2009-06-30 at 17:38 -0400, George Reeke wrote:

> On Thu, 2009-06-11 at 18:59 -0700, N B Day wrote:
> > >
> > 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.

This is an aside, not related to your main issue, but more of an FYI.
Many window managers will happily pick up your GNOME or KDE settings if
you load them.  Some window managers even make it easy:  Openbox, for
example, ships with example autostart scripts (which you can use or not
use as you see fit) that will start processes needed to load your GNOME
or KDE settings.  In those scenarios, gconf-editor will work outside
GNOME, though only because you are, technically, running parts of the
GNOME DE.  In theory, any window manager that adheres to free desktop
standards should be able to utilize GNOME or KDE settings.  In practice,
of course, numerous other factors come into play.

--
Michael M.

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