Since several weeks now I had a problem with chromium. The web browser segfaulted on launch until I ran xfsettings. This daemon configures desktop settings for the xfce desktop. It listens to xfconf and uses the xsettings protocol to propagate configuration changes on-the-fly. So you can use xfce4-settings-manager and rely on the xfce configuration mechanism to change your desktop settings nicely. Actually I used that to easily change the GTK and icon themes.

This is great for fully integrated desktop environment as it gives you a shiny graphical interface that “just works”. However it doesn’t work so much when you modify much of your configuration by hand.

For example, I use a script which listens to changes in the VGA output port and uses xrandr to setup the screen accordingly. But no matter what, if I start xfsettingsd after the initial configuration, it resets everything to whatever xfce thinks my screen configuration should be. And since I didn’t told him, it has no clue. The same apply for the keyboard, for which I use the device name to select the layout (dvorak/azerty/qwerty). The daemon just resets the layout, and worst of all, enables numlock. But again, it has no clue.

So I decided not to use xfsettings anymore. But as soon as I did that, the chromium web browser did not want to start. It even segfaulted, which is bad, but anyway. I guess the problem was a misconfigured gtkrc (well… xfce wasn’t there to hold my hand anymore) which for some reason made chromium go completely nuts. So I fixed this by using LXAppearance to generate a more complete gtkrc which I modified by hand aftewards.

In fact, the actual problem was the gtk-font-name that missed an explicit font family. In other words, in my gtkrc,  I had this:

gtk-font-name="8"

Which I changed to this:

gtk-font-name="Droid Sans 8"