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htorque
Asked: 2011-05-28 08:13:26 +0800 CST

How do I clean up my dconf database?

  • 772

Dconf is pretty young, yet my database is already a mess with lots of "schema-less" keys. Is there a way to do some cleaning up, or would I need to start from scratch (by removing ~/.config/dconf/user I guess)?

dconf

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This is possible using the dconf reset command, though it's not clear if that's a side-effect of a bug.

    • For a single key:

      dconf reset "/path/to/the/key"

      Must not end with a /.

    • For a whole path:

      dconf reset -f "/path/to/the/path/"

      Must end with a /.

    If you do this while having dconf-editor opened, it will likely crash.

    • 38

  2. If you want to clean the dconf database, you first have to dump the whole dconf configuration via:

    morfik:~$ cd ~/.config/dconf/
morfik:~/.config/dconf$ dconf dump / > user-backup
morfik:~/.config/dconf$ ls -al ./user-backup
-rw-r--r-- 1 morfik morfik 30.0K 2015-02-07 08:18:04 ./user-backup
morfik:~/.config/dconf$ rm user

    After those steps you have to reopen your graphical session (log out/in). This will create the ~/.config/dconf/user file anew with almost 0 content -- default settings.

    As for the user-backup file you had created earlier, it's just a plain text file:

    ...
[apps/light-locker]
late-locking=false
lock-after-screensaver=uint32 1
lock-on-suspend=true
...

    So you can edit it and remove the desired entries/blocks from that file. In other words -- clean it.

    When you're done, load it:

    morfik:~/.config/dconf$ dconf load / < ./user-backup
morfik:~/.config/dconf$ ls -al ./user-backup
-rw-r--r-- 1 morfik morfik 14.0K 2015-02-07 08:26:23 ./user-backup
morfik:~/.config/dconf$ dconf update /

    I think you should restart your graphical session after that again.

    And that's it, but you have to remember that all entries that have default values wont be saved -- they will be created anew when some app will ask for it, which is a good thing because you want to backup only the values you had changed.

    • 5

  3. Install gconf-cleaner from the software center.
    sudo apt-get install gconf-cleaner

    In their own words "GConf Cleaner is a tool to clean your Gconf database up that is possibly cluttered with unnecessary or invalid keys."

    • 0

  4. Very late to this, but I found a way to remove particularly stubborn old entries that isn't mentioned here. In /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas, there will be several .gschema.xml files. Look there, you'll probably find files associated with those entries.

    Remove them like this.

    rm -v /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.shell.extensions.stubborn.gschema.xml

    Then recompile the gschemas.compiled file with this command:

    glib-compile-schemas /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/

    From there, I used Alt+F2 > r to reload. Not sure if that's necessary. If using Wayland, you'll probably have to restart if it is. And the entries were gone.

    • 0