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I cannot drag and drop anything from the activities menu to the launcher/dock. I also cannot set my background picture or the lock screen picture.

I tried this command in terminal and get the error below.

root@XXXX:/home/XXXXX# gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences use-experimental-views false

Error Message: The key is not writable

Would be greatly appreciated for any assistance to correct this issue.

Gabriel Staples
  • 9,155
tron12
  • 21

2 Answers2

1

This applies to any version of Linux Ubuntu running Gnome, including Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04, 22.04, etc.

How to unlock your locked-down Gnome Linux system settings

In case this applies to you, Gnome allows Linux system administrators (ex: using Chef, I hypothesize, as one possible tool) the ability to lock down certain settings. If you're an admin/root user on your computer, you can unlock locked-down settings by going to the directory at /etc/dconf/db/local.d/locks/ and then either moving files out of this directory, deleting them, or just commenting lines in them out. Any setting in any file in this directory is a locked-down setting.

See:

  1. Read more here about how Linux sysadmins can lock down settings:
    1. Both of these help articles talk about adding setting lock files to your /etc/dconf/db/local.d/locks/ directory:
    2. Gnome Help: Lock down specific settings
    3. ***** Gnome Help: Lock the screen when the user is idle
  2. More on Chef:
    1. Note: Chef isn't necessarily how your settings were locked down, but if your system administrators are using Chef, I bet it is how they are doing it.
    2. https://www.chef.io/
    3. https://www.chef.io/products/chef-infra
    4. https://www.tutorialspoint.com/chef/chef_overview.htm
    5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_Chef
    6. https://github.com/chef/chef
Gabriel Staples
  • 9,155
0

[SOLVED] I figured it out finally. Looks like my ~/.config directory permissions got really messed up which caused me to not be able to add to my favorites, etc...

  1. sudo chown -R YOUR_USER_NAME ~/.config
  2. sudo chmod -R 755 ~/.config

That should fix it. It only took me two weeks to figure it out, so hopefully I was able to help someone out without spending that amount of time!

Gabriel Staples
  • 9,155
tron12
  • 21