Xfce Forum

dragomr

Member

Registered: 2019-06-06

Posts: 2

Xfce settings blown away when switching from el7 to el6

We have workstations at work with Centos-6 or Centos-7. The user home directories are NFS mounts, so the $HOME is the same when a user changes machines, with different OS-es.
The Centos-6.10 machines have Xfce-4.8 installed, while the Centos-7.6 machines have Xfce-4.12.
Whenever a new user logs into Centos-7, onto Xfce for the first time, they choose "default config" and get the default panel. After logging out and logging into Xfce on a Centos-6 machine, the whole panel is reduced to a single, empty panel. No widgets whatsoever.
If I then add back the widgets and log in again on a Centos-7 machine, the panel seems to persist, so ok.
The same (fortunate case) happens when a new user logs into Xfce on a Centos-6 machine for the first time, goes with the default config/panel, and then logs into a Centos-7 machine. The panel retains its widgets.

I understand this is not a common practice, but for the least, I should be able to set something like XDG_CONFIG_HOME to something else on Centos-6 machines, keeping completely different settings across OS-es.
That was not the case. I tried setting it in /etc/profile.d/xfce.sh, ~/.bashrc, /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc, and even in /usr/bin/startxfce4. The result is always the same: An empty panel and previous panel(s) and their widgets are blown away. This is likely because the XDG_CONFIG_HOME, in each of the locations above, was read sometime after the initial session start. Indeed, opening a terminal shows the env variable was set as I desired, but at that point, it was already too late, despite having created config files in the newly defined XDG_CONFIG_HOME location. The config had already been read from the default XDG_CONFIG_HOME value (~/.config/xfce4), overwritting the Centos-7 settings.

Any idea how a working setup with completely separated desktop/panel configs with two OS-es sharing the same $HOME directory for a user ?

alcornoqui

Member

Registered: 2014-07-28

Posts: 832

Re: Xfce settings blown away when switching from el7 to el6

Hello and welcome to the forum.

I don't have an answer, but a search returned this post on Stack Overflow, perhaps it gives you some ideas: Different linux distros sharing the same /home folder?

Let's hope someone has a similar setup and can answer here, good luck!

dragomr

Member

Registered: 2019-06-06

Posts: 2

Re: Xfce settings blown away when switching from el7 to el6

Thanks for the response. The idea of using symlinks is not bad, but won't help in this case since the home directory is on NFS, so the same physical location are shared across Centos-6 and Centos-7 machines. I can't have separate symlinks for the same config directory.