I had written asking if anyone had experienced the loss of the ability to save files in MP3 format. There were several helpful suggestions,
unfortunately none of them panned out. I was going to start checking permissions as suggested but I could not swallow this as a
solution. It did not seem to make sense that the permissions had changed. I had not changed them, if an update had been responsible
then others would have run into the problem as well. The other possibility might have been that someone else had changed them but
no one else here would use my computer without asking and if they did I would simply have created a separate account for them to use.
Perhaps a remote attacker but I keep my firewall as closed as possible, do not allow ssh access to this machine and its not on when I am not here anyway.
Someone might still have gained access but there is nothing of personal or professional value here and modifying the culprit file seems an unlikely way to cover
ones tracks if someone had accessed the machine. Admittedly I do not entirely understand the purpose of this file....I am getting to the sort of solution referenced
in the subject line. So following that line of reasoning I decided it had to be related to this user profile.
I went into the ~/.gconf/system folder, since the problem was not application specific it seemed like a good place to start. Inside this folder I have
a directory, gstreamer, and another file named %gconf.xml. Assuming the gstreamer directory was created by the gstreamer packages I had installed
I figured that would not be it as no one else reported the problem. So I opened the only other file there %gconf.xml, its empty. On a whim I renamed by adding .old
to the name. Logged out and back in and viola suddenly my apps now have the option for mp3 again. I ripped a cd in mp3 format. The resulting files played without
issue. So I went back, renamed the file to its original state, log out and back in. Bang, no more mp3 options! I added the .old to the file name. Logout/in , presto mp3
functionality restored.
So my question now is what is the purpose of this empty file? I went into the ~/.gconf/system/gstreamer directory and in that directory and several sub-directories there
are files named %gconf.xml, most empty when viewed with a text editor, perhaps that is not the app to view the contents correctly but it did open with gedit and if it couldn't
read the contents would expect an error or a file full of undecipherable characters. The .gconf directories seem to be littered with files like this most of them empty though
a few have what look mostly like bool values and formatting options to my amateur eyes.
So I have my solution but I cannot explain this, since empty files with this same name, %gconf.xml, appear all over the place. Presumably the apps go into the ~/.gconf/system
directory looking for these files, apparently they would hit this particular instance of it and use it for something but who knows what? Writing values to it for one time use maybe.
Making the file disappear by renaming it fixes the issue but again I don't know why this should be so. I am guessing that the apps should have been looking in the gstreamer directory
instead, perhaps to figure out supported formats but that does not make sense since I only lost the ability to save as mp3's and not .wav, ogg, flac, mp2 or any others. I do not like to
guess.
Thanks
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