paul@zaphod.uchicago.edu (Paul Burchard) (01/08/91)
I'm enjoying my new NeXTstation except for one or two annoying little things. Here's one I couldn't figure out: some of my preferences (set by the Preferences app) seem to disappear when I log out and log back in. But only some. Here is the state of things upon re-login: My choices for mouse speed, menu button enabling, and key repeat rate are no longer in effect when I log in again, nor does Preferences know anything about them. My choice of system beep, while no longer in effect, is still highlighted in Preferences(!?). And finally, despite the non-effect of these prefs, a dread -l reveals that these choices are nevertheless all recorded under the owner "NeXT1" in the defaults database. So I use Preferences to re-make my choices. What changes? Only the file ~/.NeXT/.NeXTdefaults.L changes, and these changes are not significant enough to show up in a dread -l. It seems that only some bytes in the "header" of this file are changed. Yet my choices now take effect. Sound like the ~/.NeXT/.NeXTdefaults.L file is getting damaged during logout-login? That's what I thought. No. In fact the only file changed during the logout-login process is ~/.NeXT/defaults.wmd, and these changes appear to be trivial, only permuting various pieces of the file (I don't know its syntax, so that could be significant). Either this is a bug, or preferences are never truly statically recorded, or this whole thing is too arcane to deserve the "NeXT" label. Any ideas? Similar experiences? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul Burchard <burchard@math.utah.edu> ``I'm still trying to learn how to count backwards from infinity...'' -----------------------------------------------------------------------------