Ryan Lortie
desrt@desrt.ca 2012
Jeremy Bicha
jbicha@ubuntu.com 2012
Jim Campbell
jwcampbell@gmail.com 2012
Jana Svarova
jana.svarova@gmail.com 2013
Ekaterina Gerasimova
kittykat3756@gmail.com 2013
Petr Kovar
pknbe@volny.cz 2019

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Set system-wide default settings using dconf profiles.

# Custom default values for system settings

System-wide default settings can be set by providing a default for a key in a dconf profile. These defaults can be overridden by the user.

# Set a default value

To set a default for a key, the user profile must exist and the value for the key must be added to a dconf database.

## An example setting the default background

Create the user profile:

## /etc/dconf/profile/user

user-db:user system-db:local

local is the name of a dconf database.

Create a keyfile for the local database which contains the default settings:

## /etc/dconf/db/local.d/01-background

# dconf path [org/gnome/desktop/background]

# dconf key names and their corresponding values picture-uri='file:///usr/local/share/backgrounds/wallpaper.jpg' picture-options='scaled' primary-color='000000' secondary-color='FFFFFF'

Update the system databases:

    # dconf update

When the user profile is created or changed, the user will need to log out and log in again before the changes will be applied.

If you want to avoid creating the user profile, you can use the dconf command-line utility to read and write individual values or entire directories from and to a dconf database. For more information, see the dconf(1) man page.