XFCE4 Keyboard Settings Broken Under Jessie: xfsettingsd
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:date: 2015-04-26 18:30:44
:author: bnewbold
:category: text
:slug: 2015-04-26-xfce4-keyboard-settings-broken-under-jessie
:status: published

I had a very strange problem after running a dist-upgrade with debian
jessie. This was on a laptop which was installed fresh with jessie while
it was still testing (around December 2014); I ran dist-upgrade in April
2015 around (or a bit before) the official Jessie release.

After updating packages and rebooting, my XFCE4 application keyboard
bindings were broken (eg, Super+t for xterm). Other symptoms were that
system fonts got subjectively uglier. The weird thing was that windows
manager bindings (eg, Super+F11 to maximize vertically) still worked. I
keep my XFCE4 settings under version control, along with the rest of my
dotfiles, so initially I assumed there had been some backwards
incompatible change... I also suspected that maybe the window manager
initiation process had changed. My old .xinitrc has

always needed small tweaks for new OS releases.

In the end, the problem seems to have been that \`\`xfsettingsd\`\` had
crashed and would not restart on new logins. Simply running this command
from a terminal in X11 once somehow magically fixed the problem, and
\`\`xfsettingsd\`\` runs (with corrected \`\`--sm-client-id\`\`
arguments et al) on reboot, and my old keyboard settings all work as
expected.

I tried a number of smaller fixes (including wiping
\`\`~/.cache/settings\`\` from the console), so it may have been one of
those changes that ultimately fixed everything.