I am well familiar with the dangers of an x-windows clipboard “manager” interfering with the copy-paste operations of LibreOffice, for example as detailed in Copy/Paste clipboard issues LibreOffice Calc However, this problem appears to have surfaced in xfce4 version 20.3 and I cannot find or figure out how to disable the external clipboard management. In particular, I have removed the xfce4-clipman-plugin entirely from my system, but the problem persists. Does anyone know how to (or whether it is possible) to configure xfce4 v20.3 to leave LibreOffice’s clipboard selections in peace? Thanks for any guidance, and I will of course also ask on the xfce4 forum and post any answer I get back here.
From xfce 20.3 - LibreOffice detrimental clipboard interaction / Desktop / Xfce Forums, this situation can be resolved by making sure that xfsettingsd runs with the environment variable setting XFSETTINGSD_NO_CLIPBOARD=1.
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For what it’s worth, I have created Highly detrimental interaction between clipboard management and LibreOffice (#125) · Issues · Xfce / libxfce4ui · GitLab suggesting that the clipboard handling of xfce 20 either be enhanced so as not to disrupt LibreOffice, or made easy to turn off completely.
Sounds like a gamechanger but where do I find
environment variable setting XFSETTINGSD_NO_CLIPBOARD=1.
- not all of us are developers
more like semi knowledgeable users
If you could add a bit more info and I will make sure the protocol is found on MXlinux too?
Environment Variables from the Redhat blog. Or using a search engine you’ll find info on Mxlinux in particular.
Thanks robleyd for the possibilities
My delay is due to the investigation of the files in MXlinux being different and that I am not a programmer or developer but a user who has to get under the hood of the machine from time to time.
I am currently waiting for a second response on the MXlinux forum as to where the environmental instruction is best placed…
The problem clearly lies with a conflict between the xfce system in my case and LO but copy and paste is such a fundamental process that the conflict seems to have caused a problem across many platforms and LO is the only Office option. It worked before an update and now causes me to think I am going to go back to my old sustem of updating once a version has been around for a long time with no problems. I must have lost two working days tring to find myself a solution or understand possible solutions and trying them.
I am Extremely Grateful to all the developers and people who contribute to the forums for my FREE system but surely there has to be a better way? It does nothing for the reliabilty and trust of standard users and surely will be more popular for people trying to avoid Big Tech in America?
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Unfortunately the details of how to accomplish this configuration can vary from system to system. Here are some possibilities:
- After you boot your computer, open up a command terminal (sometimes called a command shell) and execute the following two commands:
pkill xfsettingsd
XFSETTINGSD_NO_CLIPBOARD=1 xfsettingsd &
The drawback with this method is that you will have to redo it each time you restart your computer.
- If you would like this configuration to happen automatically each time you start your computer, you can start by opening a command terminal and entering
echo $PATH
This will display a list of directories separated by colons. Hopefully one of them will be a directory you can easily create a file in, like maybe a directory called bin in your home directory. If so, create a file in that directory called myxfsettingsd with exactly the following contents:
#!/bin/bash
XFSETTINGSD_NO_CLIPBOARD=1 xfsettingsd
When that file is created, make the directory it is in your current directory (there is a cd command for doing that sort of thing, and execute the command
chmod +x myxfsettingsd
Now check that all worked by executing
which myxfsettingsd
and the shell should respond with the full path to the file you just created. Now the last step you need to do is to make sure that when your xfce desktop starts up, it runs myxfsettingsd instead of xfsettingsd. Unfortunately, that’s the bit I can’t necessarily tell you how to do – it depends on how your xfce session is being set up. So hopefully you can find where in that process for you xfsettingsd is being run, and replace it with myxfsettingsd.
In my case, I have the saving and restoring of xfce sessions turned off. So for me, I always run what xfce calls the “Failsafe” session. And the commands that are run to set that session up are stored in the xfce-settings-editor. And for me, the xfsettingsd is run by Command1 in that list. So what I did to swap in myxfsettingsd for xfsettingsd is execute the following command in a shell:
xfconf-query -c xfce4-session -p /sessions/Failsafe/Client1_Command -a -t string -s myxfsettingsd
But unfortunately that will only work for you if it’s also the case that you are always running the Failsafe session. If not, then sadly I am not familiar with how you might change how your session starts up so that it runs myxfsettingsd instead of xfsettingsd. Perhaps someone else on this forum has suggestions, or you could try asking on the xfce forum (which might have the added side benefit of helping to motivate the xfce community to mitigate this bad interaction).
Wish I could be of more specific help. I am just not completely familiar with all of the possible xfce configurations, so all I could do was share the exact details of how I got it working on my computer.
Or you could use the suggestions from search results I posted - how to make a path or environment variable permanent and add it to your .bashrc file.
Yes, that will work as long as the .bashrc will have been read by whatever starts xfsettingsd. I suppose that’s likely to be the case.
Somewhat off topic:
From man bash:
When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-interactive shell with the --login option, it first reads and executes commands from the file /etc/profile, if that file exists. After reading that file, it looks for ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile, in that order, and reads and executes commands from the first one that exists and is readable. The --noprofile option may be used when the shell is started to inhibit this behavior.
When an interactive login shell exits, or a non-interactive login shell executes the exit builtin command, bash reads and executes commands from the file ~/.bash_logout, if it exists.
When an interactive shell that is not a login shell is started, bash reads and executes commands from ~/.bashrc, if that file exists. This may be inhibited by using the --norc option. The --rcfile file option will force bash to read and execute commands from file instead of ~/.bashrc.
Hello,
Many, many thanks for this. I am happy to follow instructions but would not know how to set this up. At least I have the bones of it by having your commands. Brilliant, I am very grateful.
I had asked for this kind of help in the MXlinux forum, really wanting a destination from experienced users, assuming that I am running the most up to date version and therefore someone would tell me which folder I needed to place the instruction. On other sites, as you pointed out to me, there are slightly different locations.
The results of my question were disappointing so far but I must check this morning. The inital reaction was - look a this website to learn how to do it. When I said that there was nothing new in the website another subscriber told me to learn more! I am a user who used to need to know how to get computers up and running and fixed when something goes wrong as part of my job but I gave up any notions of me being a programmer decades ago. Mostly Linux problems for users are straight forward - one of its great advantages but this is beyond most users yet happens to many across different distros. So, I wrote a stroppy reply last night and resolved to think about an alternative to xfce… I will see if it had any effect later
I had looked around for directories and files that fitted the descriptions in other sites but I could not find anything conclusive. So, I am now a lot nearer to hopefully solving this conundrum.
Again, I am grateful for the time and effort to explain and to provide code for my file
I hope you have a good day!
best wishes
Shay
Yes. I just wasn’t certain that whatever process is invoking xfsettingsd is inside a shell at all. (that was a response to @robleyd’s quote of the bash shell manual page)
As an update to this
I used the solution of gwhitney (many thanks for that and making the size of this concern known too) -
to make the file as suggested and I used the session manager in MXlinux to invoke it at startup, which works!
However, it changes some things in the way the distro works etc
I tried deleting the session manager entry and it still works.
I have also deleted the file (myxfsettingssd) altogether from usr/bin and the problem does not re-appear.
This would seem to imply that something gets knocked out of place during the start up process to cause the fault but once it is stopped it doesn’t do it again? (I note the reference to not knowing what the file does to other files in the system - somewhere in that is maybe an answer?).
Well, the related xfce issue I linked above (Highly detrimental interaction between clipboard management and LibreOffice (#125) · Issues · Xfce / libxfce4ui · GitLab) is now closed and a fix has been merged into the xfce source code, so I suppose it is possible that the fix has been released, and already propagated to your system (presuming you’ve recently updated xfce?) – I’m not really sure.
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Hello again,
Very grateful fo rthe pressure you applied on presenting this in the way you did> I am not in a position to write technical stuff but I am bright enough to realise that you presented the problem as I perceived it too.
Interesting that it seemed to be fixed and would explain why my experiment to reinstate the set up I had originally had no detrimental effect on this problem.
Well done anyway, even if no one is willing to admit a problem or that a solution was made
Progress… fingers crossed.
regards
Shay