Tails

#13 Updated by triceps1 2018-06-07 17:28:20

> I think we should reject this ticket, because we decided at some point to rely on defautl GNOME settings for this. If you disagree, don’t hesitate to reopen this.

> > I disagree. Touchpad settings (tap-to-click, scrolling direction etc.) is about muscle memory and not something we can ask users to just deal with our default settings: e.g. natural scrolling is a burden for those who are used to the opposite; it’s the default on Windows so we’re not talking about a corner case here. So it would be nice to give the option to persistently configure this differently.

I also disagree with the rejection of this ticket.

It is a massive pain if i start running my persistant Tails and thinks work can start right now and then i be hurtly remindet that I have to chage various Gnome settings every time i start Tails.
So i have to disable the horrible ‘natural scrolling’ and as a MacBook user without physically buttons on my touchpad, I have to struggle around with the ‘tap-to-click’ function and the unavailible secondary button on my touchpad (right click on the touchpad bottom).

After set up my Gnome settings every time once again, it’s frustrating enough that the Apple specific buttons alt/option (⌥) & cmd (⌘) have a total different meaning in Linux/Tails.
My workflow get destroyed every few minutes.

It would be super nice if you could make the Gnome settings saved persistently.
At least you could integrate a script generator, so that every user could generate his very own gnome settings script whom will be saved in the persistent folder and could be started manually after every persistent boot.

#14 Updated by intrigeri 2018-06-10 10:21:03

> It would be super nice if you could make the Gnome settings saved persistently.
> At least you could integrate a script generator, so that every user could generate
> his very own gnome settings script whom will be saved in the persistent folder and
> could be started manually after every persistent boot.

Personally I have a persistent script that I run after login and that contains a bunch of dconf commands, which seems pretty close to what you’re asking for. Now, of course this requires finding out the name of dconf settings and fiddling with command line interfaces so it’ll only work for somewhat-technical users.

#15 Updated by triceps1 2018-06-25 13:57:16

> Now, of course this requires finding out the name of dconf settings and fiddling with command line interfaces so it’ll only work for somewhat-technical users.

Considering the usability and design goals of tails i agree that it makes no sense to solve the problem of non-persistent configurations on this way. But i still think it’s worth resolving this problem because it makes tails unhandy in a serious way.

> Personally I have a persistent script that I run after login and that contains a bunch of dconf commands, which seems pretty close to what you’re asking for.

Can you explain your script/workaround for my personal use?
I never worked with dconf and my bash scripting skills are low level.

At least i found the file including the Xorg defaults:

/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-tails.conf

Section “InputClass”

Identifier “Tails-touchpad-configuration”

MatchIsTouchpad “on”

Option “TapButton1” “1”

Option “VertTwoFingerScroll” “1”

EndSection

I also know what parameters I need to change:

Option "TapButton1" "0"

Option “VertTwoFingerScroll” “0”

What I need to know is which dconf commands I need to change these parameters?

#16 Updated by nodens 2019-11-03 11:53:55

Hey there,

dconf keys can be hard and cryptic at times.

Here is how I did it:

- save default settings before changing anything:

gsettings list-recursively > gsettings.default

- change the settings you want (e.g. in Gnome Control Center)

- save the updated settings:

gsettings list-recursively > gsettings.updated

- check the differences and get a list of gsettings commands:

diff gsettings.{default,updated} | sed -rn 's/^> (.*)/gsettings set \1/p'

You’ll get a bunch of gsettings command you can put in a script in your persistence, to be run after login.

Note that you’ll have to put some quotes around the multi-value keys (in [ ]), I didn’t bother to handle that in the sed command since I wanted to review the settings and get only the one that really mattered to me in the script.

#20 Updated by intrigeri 2019-11-16 09:57:51

I’ve marked this ticket as related to the other requests for persistence presets that are about prefs stored in dconf/gsettings. It’s clear to me that we should not allow persisting the entire dconf database but a facility to persist relevant bits of it could be nice; I can imagine cheap, simple implementation possibilities, depending on the chosen UX design. How this could be exposed to users is another matter, and probably requires non-trivial UX design work.