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I'm setting a fresh Debian 12 bookworm up. I played a little with settings and extensions. While trying to set my compose key —GUI allows to set it as "pause", but it has no effect, while I can choose "right-super"— I could have messed up a bit. I downloaded and executed the perl script at https://askubuntu.com/questions/26056/where-are-gnome-keyboard-shortcuts-stored, but only in export mode anyway: ./keybindings.pl -e /tmp/keys.csv. I ran it both as root and as user 1000. In both cases I get

dconf-WARNING **: 16:55:41.021: unable to open file '/etc/dconf/db/local:X': L’ouverture du fichier « /etc/dconf/db/local:X » a échoué : échec de open() : Aucun fichier ou dossier de ce type; expect degraded performance

Neither Google nor Bing have any response to the query for "/etc/dconf/db/local:X" (with quotes). dconf itself is just a back-end for configuration settings…

According to loginctl, my session is of type Wayland.

I currently have

$ ls -l /etc/dconf/db
total 20
drwxr-xr-x 2 root       root       4096 2024-12-30 12:41 ibus.d
drwxr-xr-x 3 root       root       4096 2025-01-13 10:52 local.d
-rw-r--r-- 1 ondelettes ondelettes 5459 2025-01-14 16:56 ibus
-rw-r--r-- 1 ondelettes ondelettes  408 2025-01-14 16:56 local

$ ls -l /etc/dconf/profile
total 8
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 28 2023-02-13 12:22 ibus
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 31 2025-01-13 10:39 user

$ chmod a+rxw /etc/dconf/db had no effect on the issue.

$ dconf update as user or root returns no error, nor any improvement.

If I touch /etc/dconf/db/local:X, I get invalid gvdb header the next time.

If I launch gnome-terminal or soffice from command line, I get the same warning message (unable to open file '/etc/dconf/db/local:X'), which is annoying as I work whole day from command line.

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  • chmod a+rxw /etc/dconf/db wah! Don't do such things! Undo it! Commented Jan 14 at 17:54
  • To find out which process accesses a file you can run your program with strace -f... and a suitable selection which system calls you want to trace, e.g. -e trace=file Commented Jan 14 at 18:17
  • @MarcusMüller Thanks, done. @Bodo Thanks. strace -f on terminal gives 7146 lines of output, of which 28 are openat(AT_FDCWD, "/etc/dconf/db/local:X", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT. I just have no idea how to use that command. Thank you anyway. Commented Jan 14 at 21:42

1 Answer 1

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As usual, when the whole Internet community doesn’t know the answer, the problem is local. :-)

So I finally could track it down.

My file /etc/./dconf/profile/user contained the faulty local:X which was a mistyped command in vi insert mode: instead of “save and exit” I just added some characters at the end of the file that should have read instead

user-db:user
system-db:local

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