CDE Settings Lost

[MarkSyder]

Hi everybody,

One of my users reported to me this morning that his CDE settings had been lost (he's looked behind the couch to no avail). When he logged in he received only the default settings.

I have spent most of the morning with the CDE Advanced User's and System Administrator's guide on my desk while I examine his system looking for files which have changed on or since Friday, the last time it worked. Nothing! Most of the files haven't changed since 2000.

I would suspect user error, but the user is very experienced and I doubt that he has made a mistake.

Any ideas?

Mark Syder (like the drink but spelt different)

[Steve Steel]

Hi


.dt contains it all

$HOME/.dt/errorlog .old .older
........./startlof .old .older

Are there errors

Also look in /var/dt/Xerrors

Also did user get style manager to restart
HOME session every login

Steve Steel-

[Pete Randall]

Mark,

I've seen this happen a few times but never did figure out why. You can try restoring the users .dt subdirectory from backup and see if that fixes it.

I always set the "home session" and return to that rather than the "resume last session" choice. That seems to eliminate the problem.


Pete

[MarkSyder]

Thanks Steve/Pete,

Error logs don't show anything.

I've spoken to the user and he says he's happy to re-create his setup manually rather than wait for the tape drive to find the appropriate part of the backup tape.

Mark

[Rick Beldin]

Make sure that you are using current CDE runtime patches for your environment. There was a defect some time ago that would cause settings to be lost if you had more than 9 icons on your desktop.

Some could perhaps get to a 'recoverable' desktop if they were to configure things as they liked it, then save a HOME session. They could then log back in with that session and revert to a current session. If the problem happened again, they could revert to the HOME session and get some of their customizations back.