18.04 recently lost tap-to-click at login (gdm)

Question

I recently lost tap-to-click ability at the login screen (gdm). I originally enabled it in 17.10 and it survived into 18.04 until a few days ago. So I'm not sure what happened.

I followed instructions here by doing:

sudo -u gdm gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-to-click true

But I'm getting this error message:

(process:26095): dconf-CRITICAL **: 17:43:24.120: unable to create directory '/home/user/.cache/dconf': Permission denied. dconf will not work properly.

(process:26095): dconf-WARNING **: 17:43:24.120: failed to commit changes to dconf: Could not connect: Connection refused

And when I run to try and fix:

sudo -u gdm dbus-launch gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-to-click true

I get this:

(process:26477): dconf-WARNING **: 17:52:56.774: failed to commit changes to dconf: GDBus.Error:org.gtk.GDBus.UnmappedGError.Quark._g_2dfile_2derror_2dquark.Code2: Cannot open dconf database: Failed to open file “/home/user/.config/dconf/user”: Permission denied

I decided to try deleting ~/.cache/dconf and tried again to no avail.

Can anyone help? Thanks.

Edited to add more info.

Answer 1

Try this: Enable ‘Tap to click’ in Ubuntu. It worked for me.

1. Open terminal via Ctrl+Alt+T, then run command to get root privileges:

   sudo -i
   

   Type in your password (no visual feedback while typing) when it prompts and press Enter.

2. (Not required in default Wayland session) Allow user gdm to create a connection to the X server:

   xhost +SI:localuser:gdm
   

3. Switch to user gdm in the terminal:

   su gdm -s /bin/bash
   

4. Finally enable 'Tap to click' via gdm user:

   gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-to-click true
   

   

5. Restart your computer and done.

   sudo reboot
   

How to Restore:

To restore the setting, open terminal and redo the previous steps except run the following command instead of the command in Step 4:

    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-to-click false