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I am trying to change some gconf settings in Ubuntu 12.10. I would like to change the lightdm greeter background.

I have discovered that while logged in to unity as a user while running X server, I am able to do this with:

sudo xhost +SI:localuser:lightdm
gsettings set com.canonical.unity-greeter background "'/usr/share/backgrounds/micros-background.png'"

The problem is that this requires me to login as a user under X. So that entire window manager needs to be running. But I want to use chroot to change these settings without any X server running. I just want to mount the partitions and change gsettings without having the full window manager running.

Is there a way to directly change gsettings without being logged into X and Unity?

Or alternatively... is there a way to bring up the X server and Unity in the background so that I can make the changes without having a full windowed display come up on my monitor?

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17

It's possible to run gsettings without X11 using dbus-launch --exit-with-session:

dbus-launch --exit-with-session gsettings set com.canonical.unity-greeter background "'/usr/share/backgrounds/micros-background.png'"
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  • Thank you for this! I used this to set settings for another user not logged in like this sudo -u "username" dbus-launch --exit-with-session gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power lid-close-ac-action 'nothing' – HarlemSquirrel Mar 3 '15 at 19:20
  • If you prepend the line 5cdhn suggests with sudo, you can edit root's dconf (when using dconf-editor and gsettings with sudo/gksu throw this error). Another way to do this is with 'sudo/gksu dbus-launch gsetttnigs/dconf-editor' as Paco Porras suggests. – Que Quotion Sep 14 '16 at 16:33
  • This does not appear to work when you have a session currently running. For example, I want to change keyboard layout when I plug/unplug the keyboard. Running gsettings inside a udev script, even using dbus-launch, does not apply the settings for the currently running session. – Ben Davis Aug 9 '19 at 18:45
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    “No protocol specified” on attempt to test this. – realkstrawn93 Sep 30 '19 at 20:53
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Some people says that you must precede the "gsettings" command by the "dbus-launch" word, but I haven't tried it.

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