Disabling thumbnails in Nautilus using dconf

Question

Bellow are the steps I undertook to try to disable thumbnails in Nautilus ( following instruction mentioned here: https://wiki.gnome.org/dconf/SystemAdministrators ) . It didn't help. (I'm on Debian Wheezy, which seemingly has no /etc/dconf by default):

• mkdir -p /etc/dconf/db/local.d/locks

• nano /etc/dconf/db/local.d/settings

  # /etc/dconf/db/local.d/settings
  # prevent showing thumbnails
  [org.gnome.nautilus.preferences]
  show-image-thumbnails="never"
  

• nano /etc/dconf/db/local.d/locks/settings

  # prevent changes to showing thumbnails setting
  org.gnome.nautilus.preferences.show-image-thumbnails
  

• mkdir /etc/dconf/profile

• nano /etc/dconf/profile/local

  system-db:local
  

• export DCONF_PROFILE=/etc/dconf/profile

• dconf update

What's wrong here?

I also tried to disable it using dconf-editor (both as root and as regular user) and I was not able to change the setting from 'local-only' to 'never' it looked like it was locked.

I also tried gsettings:

# gsettings get org.gnome.nautilus.preferences show-image-thumbnails 'local-only'

# gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences show-image-thumbnails "never"

** (process:5834): WARNING **: The connection is closed

** (process:5834): WARNING **: The connection is closed

PS: I didn't reboot. Do I need to reboot in order for the new settings to take effect?

I found several dconf files but it doesn't look like they contain any lock of org.gnome.nautilus.preferences.show-image-thumbnails and adding

[org.gnome.nautilus.preferences]
show-image-thumbnails="never"

to them didn't help either. Here are they:

/var/lib/gdm3/.cache/dconf
/var/lib/gdm3/.cache/dconf/user
/var/lib/gdm3/dconf/db
/var/lib/gdm3/dconf/profile
/var/lib/gdm3/dconf/db/gdm
/var/lib/gdm3/dconf/db/gdm.d
/var/lib/gdm3/dconf/db/gdm.d/00-upstream-settings
/var/lib/gdm3/dconf/db/gdm.d/10-desktop-base-settings
/var/lib/gdm3/dconf/db/gdm.d/90-debian-settings
/var/lib/gdm3/dconf/db/gdm.d/locks
/var/lib/gdm3/dconf/db/gdm.d/locks/00-upstream-settings-locks
/var/lib/gdm3/dconf/profile/gdm

and

/usr/share/gdm/dconf
/usr/share/gdm/dconf-profile
/usr/share/gdm/dconf/00-upstream-settings
/usr/share/gdm/dconf/10-desktop-base-settings
/usr/share/gdm/dconf/locks
/usr/share/gdm/dconf/locks/00-upstream-settings-locks

It looks like dconf update ignores:

/etc/dconf/db/local.d/settings

because if I intentionally write wrong things there it doesn't complain.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I think this is the same subtle issue I stumbled over for a while... Look at the dconf(7) man page carefully.

You're trying to set DCONF_PROFILE to a directory, not to a file. Really, this isn't necessary, since effectively DCONF_PROFILE defaults to user, so just name the file /etc/dconf/profile/user to ensure it gets read:

 # cat /etc/dconf/profile/user 
 user-db:user
 system-db:local
 # 

As long as dconf update does generate a /etc/dconf/db/local file (from whatever is in /etc/dconf/db/local.d/), then this should all take effect.