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The first thing I noticed after upgrading from 11.04 to 11.10 is that my wallpaper changed to the one I used to have ages ago - probably before I upgraded from 10.10 to 11.04. Which is not a big deal, of course, but:

My daughter used to experiment with Gnome themes in her account on the same machine - you know, bright-blue window backgrounds with yellow text etc. Later she changed the settings to something more usable. After the upgrade to Oneiric, the Gnome theme reverted to blue backgrounds with yellow text and I can find no way to reset it.

I installed the "Advanced settings" tool and can change the theme there, but it looks like most of the themes fall back to some default settings for window and text colors - i.e. window decorations and other elements change, but the blue and yellow "shine through" the theme. Previously it was possible to edit the defaults but with the "streamlined" Gnome 3 UI I can't find where it is done.

The only theme which override the blue background is High Contrast theme - but it's just too ugly to be used.

Can somebody explain what caused this "time machine" effect - the settings in question were last used many months ago and then changed via standard Gnome means.

How do I remove the theme customisations and roll back to the stock standard theme?

Sergey
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  • Possible duplicate of http://askubuntu.com/questions/56313/how-do-i-reset-gnome-to-the-defaults – Knowledge Cube Oct 24 '11 at 02:11
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    I don't think it's a duplicate - I don't want to erase all user settings, I just want to change default window background color, which used to be easily editable via the normal Gnome dialogs in Gnome2. Also, I'm curious to learn what's causing this as there seems to be 2 sets of settings, old and new ones, and Gnome3 is seemingly uses the old ones - if I just erase Gnome configs I will never know. – Sergey Oct 24 '11 at 02:24
  • It occurs to me that maybe she modified the ~/.gtkrc-2.0 or one of its variants? – Severo Raz Oct 29 '11 at 08:44
  • I'm pretty sure she didn't edit anything directly - all the changes were done via standard Gnome UI. (also, the "reverting wallpaper trick" supports this - I definitely just set it via normal Gnome means) – Sergey Oct 29 '11 at 09:50

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Well, since nobody else wants to answer...

I just stumbled upon the following question and I'm pretty sure the behaviour I experienced was caused by the settings being read from one config system but configuration tools changing the settings in another.

Just to quote:

dconf is a new way for applications to store settings, and it is intended to replace gconf. dconf-editor and gconf-editor are for their respective configuration systems, and they don't talk to each other. At the moment that transition is still a work in progress, so many applications continue to use gconf. In addition, some applications still have settings left over in gconf even though they are using dconf now.

Almost all of the software that is installed by default - everything that comes from GNOME - uses dconf (if anything). Almost everything else that is available uses gconf, though this is of course changing as older software is brought up to date.

If I still had that system I would install gconf-editor and dconf-editor and poked around to see where the settings in question were stored.

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Sergey
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