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Basically what the title says. Apparently, gedit does not have any permission to write even on basic text files which have all the permissions needed. In fact, other IDES/text editors (such as Atom or LibreOffice) can open and modify such files without any problem. I've tried to troubleshoot but I'm unable to fix the problem. I tried reinstalling and upgrading it, but id didnt't solve the issue. Executing Gedit as sudo does work, but the point would be not to go superuser to read/write simple readme files on Documents. Worst case i think I could just use ATOM as my main text editor, but I'd like to keep Gedit for quick changes in simple text files.

For example, I'm trying to read a file called "Qiime2_notes.txt". 

$ ls -l
total 36
-rw-r--r-- 1 administrador administrador   164 de ma 20 10:52 Humann-notes.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 administrador administrador  7697 d’abr  9 11:54 notes.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 administrador administrador   281 de ma  4 17:56 Qiime2_automation_draft
-rwxrwxr-x 1 administrador administrador 19906 d’abr  9 13:02 Qiime2_notes.txt

I try to open it with gedit: 

gedit Qiime2_notes.txt

and it opens the file without any error warning, but I can't write, select or save the text.

Basically as if I hadn't got any permission to modify the text:

ss

however, when I open it with sudo gedit Qiime2_notes.txt, it works perfectly.

Now I can perfectly modify the file:

ss

however, opening it with atom Qiime2_notes.txt it works perfectly without sudo.

Any idea why is this happening?

Pablo Bianchi
  • 17,371
cblabo
  • 31

1 Answers1

1

I suspected it was a dconf issue and what ended up solving it for me was paying attention to the error I was getting when launching from the command line.

(gedit:2498): dconf-WARNING **: 22:15:51.286: unable to open named profile (ibus): using the null configuration.

After a bit of reading on dconf I realized my install had no profile folder in /etc/dconf/profile which kinda makes sense since it was a non-standard install So I made it and then created a profile file ibus in which i put 

user-db:user
system-db:ibus

using of course another editor :-).

according to docs the first line will point to your userspace dconf user profile https://developer.gnome.org/dconf/unstable/dconf-overview.html

according to my environment my DCONF_PROFILE=ibus by default so it looked for that now existing profile and loaded it. The warning went away and now the editor edits! Apparently without a r/w place for dconf settings gedit goes into ready only.

if the DCONF_PROFILE environment var is unset then according to the docs dconf/gsetting will use the user profile in user space by default thus bypassing what I did above. One can do that by deleting the file /etc/profile.d/set-dconfg-profile.sh

Since this was not a gedit specific fix I imagine it might cure a few issues with other gnome/gsetting apps.

so if the op still has this issue maybe they can check to see if they have this missing profile and create i, or otherwise set the DCONF_PROFILE by error.

DKebler
  • 193