Disabling Accessibility from the command line.

[Tristan Wibberley]

Tristan Wibberley wrote:
> I was trying to test accessibility in Dapper, when I found that
> I couldn't login with a GNOME session (or a gnome failsafe
> session - ironically, it is not very failsafe, it seems). I have
> logged in with enlightenment and I have found I can't start
> any gnome applications (such as gconf-editor), nor firefox
> or thunderbird.
> 
> Does anybody know how to repair a GNOME desktop
> without deleting all my settings and without being able to run
> *any* gnome programs, and possibly no gtk2 programs?
> 
> I think I just need to disable accessibility, but the gconf
> heirarchy seems to have disappeared in some version.

In case anybody else finds they have a similar problem:

I've discovered how to do this. All the ~/.gconf/ stuff has been 
collated into one file called "%gconf-tree.xml" (god help us if one 
section gets corrupted - thankfully it is at least human readable and 
modifiable).

There is a bool called "accessibility" under the dir called "interface" 
which should be set to false. You should then delete the saved-state 
file in ~/.gconfd/.

Warning: There are *no* comments in this file, and I haven't yet found 
any documentation on the meaning of the various keys and their values, 
"man 5 %gconf-tree.xml" doesn't work as expected - I will report a bug 
on that in a moment.

I have since discovered there is a program called gconftool-2 to help 
with reading and altering this file. You should use that - I would 
suggest that you first validate the file using xmllint.

Does anybody know if there is a schema for this file, to validate 
against for errors that would pass the XML parser before possibly 
totally screwing it with gconftool-2?

-- 
Tristan Wibberley