Blog: 2023-10-03

Ok trying to get in to my digitalocean instance from my ubuntu boot, here's my ubuntu public key:

ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAICIALcs/MuOwfOeoLl3+caGT8SWlfP81T8yvODHj9MBK razzi@razzi-framework

Fast link roll up

https://github.com/ziglang/zig

https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2012/05/18/qemu-img-diff/

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Ok in a huff I was replacing alacritty with kitty, since kitty properly rendered zellij and alacritty didn't, and my tmux config is missing from my dotfiles so I didn't want to reconfigure tmux again... it's been one of those days.

However I was unable to open any terminal at all when I hit the usual ctrl+alt+t shortcut.

I even changed my default terminal application with

sudo update-alternatives --config x-terminal-emulator

but that didn't do anything.

My first clue was to tail the syslog with sudo journalctl -f. This showed the warning that gsd-media-keys was logging a warning that alacritty wasn't on $PATH.

So I looked at what files gsd-media-keys had open:

$ lsof -p 28857 | less

A bunch of binary files, and...

/home/razzi/.config/dconf/user

Aha! A binary file that had alacritty mentioned in it. I knew I was close, I looked around how to reset dconf config and found https://askubuntu.com/questions/56313/how-do-i-reset-gnome-to-the-defaults

Sure enough, what worked for me was to just remove that file... even though I ended up backing it up to my ~/hack directory, just in case removing it made things worse.

But it recreated that file, no mention of alacritty at all. And kitty opens with c-a-t ;)