Suddenly I seem to be unable to make the setting for Dolphin to retain the chosen view for a given folder work--it always reverts to Preview and Icon, can't make it stay at Details. I would swear that it worked up until recently, but have no better lock on that. Anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks for your time!

If this occurs for only a particular folder, please check the permissions of ".directory" in that folder.

If it occurs for all folders, check in Dolphin Settings that your setting in Dolphin > Settings > Configure Dolphin > General > Behaviour is "Remember view properties for all folders"

Sorry, I should have mentioned that the version is Lucid, up-to-date (26 kernel). But, in any case, the permissions of the .directory file are fine, and the settings in the Dolphin>Settings>General are what they should be. Tried setting and resetting large number of times before I posted. Trying an experiment or two and will post back about it. Also, should mention that I finally got the answer to the floppy question I posted you about last spring--will detail it if you wish--new post or to the old thread?

Thanks

Good to hear, in the old thread please.

Does this work under a new user?

Experiments referred to only confirm that the settings in ~/.kde/share/apps/dolphin/view_properties/ are being observed by dolphin. Apparently the problem is that they aren't getting reset from the menu. Haven't checked the possibility of a new user (single user installation, so have to set one up), will do next.

I will post the floppy stuff later--still need to finish this and the plasma app.

Thanks, again.

Needed to add one more possibly significant observation: I have a menu entry for Dolphin which I only occasionally use, that uses KDESU to generate a root instance of Dolphin--this instance shows the proper behavior of folder settings, all in spite of the other previously mentioned irregularities.

Thanks,
Joe

kdesu runs Dolphin as root, which has it's own user profile. Can you check the permissions under ~/.kde4/ please? All files should be owned by your user. Especially check those used by Dolphin.

I don't know to which folder you refer. I have a ~/.kde folder, with a ~/.kde/share/kde4 folder but the only content is a services folder, which only contains nsplugin.desktop. My Hardy installation includes the folder of which you speak, but not this Lucid one. Didn't check the Karmic.

I have checked the ~/.kde/share/apps/dolphin/view_properties folder, all permissions there and further down are correct. I experimented with resetting them and found no joy.

Searching for dolphin didn't bring up alternative suggestions, though, there is always the /usr folder--I just don't see how that would control this once installation were complete.

Thank you for your assistance,
Joe

I was referring in this case to ~/.kde. Please check the permissions of this. You can get a list from the command "ls -lR ~/.kde/" if you are not sure.

As I remarked in my previous post, I had checked the permissions of all the apparently pertinent folders from ~/.kde/ on down. I also have checked many, though not all of the other dependent folders from ~/.kde/, and found them all to be appropriate, r,w for <user>, r for the group (<user>), and similarly for the directories. With your suggestion of the use of the -R switch, though, do you mean me to recurse through *every* directory depended from ~/.kde/? I will do it if you deem it necessary. One thing I noted from my experiment, alluded to above, is that on reboot, the permissions seem to be reset, apparently from a mask, since none of the experimental changes I attempted survived a reboot. I seem to recall seeing this behaviour before.

Thank you for confirmation,
Joe

Ok, assuming the permissions are ok, please remove the following with Dolphin closed.

Code: Select all

~/.kde4/share/apps/dolphin/view_properties
~/.kde4/share/config/dolphinrc

Actually, I think that I may have found the problem. Randomly checking things, I noticed that the /home/<user>/.directory file was owned by root, which seemed wrong to me. Not knowing any better, I changed it to <user> and it all seems to work now. I don't know how I got it that way, but I can't count on my memory to clue me in to whether I somehow did something that caused this--suffice it to say that I don't recall doing any such thing, but all's well if it ends well, to paraphrase a bit.

Thanks for your assistance. If the problem shows back up in spite of this, I'll have recourse to your deletion approach. I gather that something must regenerate these files in normal course.

My sincere appreciation for your help!

I suppose it could be possible that while you had a superuser dolphin running that you set some view settings while in the /home/<user>/ directory, overwriting the .dolphin file in that directory, resulting in the file belonging to root.

You might also check the permissions of the other .desktop files in the other folders in /home/<user>.
You can run the following at the command line to find any files owned by root:
find /home/<user>/ -name .desktop -print0 | xargs -0 ls -l | grep root

Thanks, airdrik, I think you may be correct, and I'll check for that as you suggested. I had checked some more of them once I discovered it made a difference, but the reg exp search makes more sense.

Thanks for your time,
Joe