virt-manager does not save preferences

[michael mccool]

running Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS with KDE Plasma 5.12.7 (Qt 5.9.5)
after a recent discover software update virt-manager no longer saves preferences. preferences were correctly saved previously (march 2019 and earlier)

/usr/bin/virt-manager
edit -> preferences -> polling
select poll disk i/o
select memory stats
close window

virt-manager displays cpu usage only.
on restart preferences have not been saved

also, when starting vm's the virtual machine terminal is too small.
previously (march 2019 and earlier) the vm terminals would 'remember'
the window-size that had been made.

something must be 'broken'. can't find virt-manager preferences in any text
file to determine if the file is written-to.

[Christian Ehrhardt (paelzer)]

Hi Michael,
none of the updates we have made to virt-manager since Bionic released seems related to the issue you are describing.

Furthermore I just checked this on my 18.04 and it is saving the preferences just fine (default Desktop, not KDE).

This is stored in config option "/stats/enable-disk-poll"
I think this uses gconf, so maybe something is (now) missing in your KDE environment?
All is stored under "org.virt-manager.virt-manager" namespace.

[1]: tells us that this is dconf based.
 $ dconf-editor
And I find org.virt-manager.virt-manager/stats/enable-disk-poll in there with my value (I enabled it).
It even shows that it is modified from the default (off) and lets me change it.

This should be stored in permanently in:
  /home/<user>/.config/dconf/user
and some live only data
  /run/user/1000/dconf/user

Questions:
- Do you have these files
- how do the virt-manager values appear with dconf-editor for you?
- can you persists the values with dconf-editor?

[1]: https://askubuntu.com/questions/249887/gconf-dconf-gsettings-and-the-relationship-between-them
[2]: https://askubuntu.com/questions/15262/graphical-editor-for-gsettings-dconf

[michael mccool (mcl600)]

christian,

thanks for your help

> none of the updates we have made to virt-manager since Bionic released seems
> related to the issue you are describing.

ok. thanks for clarifying

> This is stored in config option "/stats/enable-disk-poll"
> All is stored under "org.virt-manager.virt-manager" namespace.
>
> $ dconf-editor
> And I find org.virt-manager.virt-manager/stats/enable-disk-poll in there with my value (I enabled it).
> It even shows that it is modified from the default (off) and lets me change it.

> This should be stored in permanently in:
> /home/<user>/.config/dconf/user
> and some live only data
> /run/user/1000/dconf/user
>
> Questions:
> - Do you have these files

yes:

-rw-r--r-- 1 mc mc 13005 Apr 5 23:08 /home/mc/.config/dconf/user
-rw------- 1 mc mc 2 Apr 25 08:13 /run/user/1000/dconf/user

odd that /home/<user>/.config/dconf/user has not been written-to since 5 april

> - how do the virt-manager values appear with dconf-editor for you?

all 'stats' values are set to defaults.

> - can you persists the values with dconf-editor?

this does not work for me. i can change the value in dconf-editor but the
change is not persistent. quitting dconf-editor after making enable-disk-poll
"true" the setting reverts to "false" (the default). there is no error
message written to syslog or to the terminal. this is odd.

as you hint, something must be broken. how can i debug this issue? is there
an error log somewhere?

regards,
m.mccool

[Christian Ehrhardt (paelzer)]

Hi,
I'm not at all an dconf expert.
But after identifying that even base dconf-editor does not let you save things I think we can eliminate virt-manager from the equation.

I have added a task to this bug for d-conf to get maintainers of that package to take a look.
They might know where to look and after what.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Tim Crisall (tcrisall)]

Thought I was hitting this same issue - turns out it wasn't quite the same as I did NOT have dconf-editor available.

Ended up figuring this out as follows:

virt-manager --debug

<...go into preferences screen...>

(virt-manager:10411): dconf-WARNING **: 03:20:30.256: failed to commit changes to dconf: Failed to execute child process “dbus-launch” (No such file or directory)
[Fri, 29 Nov 2019 03:20:30 virt-manager 10411] DEBUG (preferences:97) Showing preferences

apt install dbus-x11

all good now.

[hanshenrik (hanshenrik)]

I had the same problem on 24.04 but only when running on root. installing dbux-x11 fixed it on root as well.

IMO dbus-x11 should be made a recommended dependency for virt-manager.