[SOLVED]WTF? Settings refuse to stick!

[agrabarchuk]

I installed Lion GM on my hackintosh a few days ago. After getting everything working, I began configuring my actual system, and noticed quite quickly that something was screwy. I realized that my finder preferences, such as having the Desktop arrange by grid view, weren't actually being saved. After each reboot, logoff, or force quit, Finder would revert to default settings. I then realized the dock was doing the same thing. I could remove apps, rearrange them, etc, but after a logoff everything was back to the way it was. Now, I've successfully fixed these problems with Finder and Dock.

 

For Finder, I had to delete it's plist, then apply my desired settings, and then force quit & relaunch. The newly generated plist would then save my settings. The permissions for the original plist were fine - fixing permissions didn't do anything.

 

For the dock, I had to do something similar. Delete the plist, run killall Dock in Terminal, and then it started remembering my preferences.

 

There's one more issue that's nagging at me. While I was setting all my preferences in System Preferences, I had to change some stuff with Sharing. As soon as I clicked on Sharing, something went wrong, and now no matter what I do, whenever I launch System Preferences, it loads on the Sharing screen, instead of being on the main menu like normal. Deleting its plist does nothing. It's not a huge bug, because as far as I can tell, the actual settings themselves are being saved, but the launch behavior is annoying me to no end.

 

The bigger issue here is why this is happening in the first place. Is there something fundamentally wrong with Lion or some kind of problem that happened along the installation process? I did a clean install today and the same thing happened all over again. The most worrying thing about this issue is that I don't know exactly how far it extends, or how many applications are affected by this. My system is essentially useless if it can't remember any of my settings and resets them every time an app is relaunched or I log off.

 

Finally, am I correct that Lion's "reopen windows when logging back in" function is completely broken? No matter what I check it brings all my windows back. Or is this related to my problem outlined above? Thanks very much in advance for any help!

 

EDIT: One more thing I noticed about System Preferences. The "General" section doesn't save any settings. I personally can't live without the "double click title bar to minimize" option, and have absolutely no way of having this enabled. And for reference, my install was done using the "USB Stick Chameleon" guide with Chameleon r1083 and everything else to the tee. I never had any of these problems on my SL hackintosh. I've tried reinstalling and the same thing happens.

[Noam AA]

I installed Lion GM on my hackintosh a few days ago. After getting everything working, I began configuring my actual system, and noticed quite quickly that something was screwy. I realized that my finder preferences, such as having the Desktop arrange by grid view, weren't actually being saved. After each reboot, logoff, or force quit, Finder would revert to default settings. I then realized the dock was doing the same thing. I could remove apps, rearrange them, etc, but after a logoff everything was back to the way it was. Now, I've successfully fixed these problems with Finder and Dock.

 

For Finder, I had to delete it's plist, then apply my desired settings, and then force quit & relaunch. The newly generated plist would then save my settings. The permissions for the original plist were fine - fixing permissions didn't do anything.

 

For the dock, I had to do something similar. Delete the plist, run killall Dock in Terminal, and then it started remembering my preferences.

 

There's one more issue that's nagging at me. While I was setting all my preferences in System Preferences, I had to change some stuff with Sharing. As soon as I clicked on Sharing, something went wrong, and now no matter what I do, whenever I launch System Preferences, it loads on the Sharing screen, instead of being on the main menu like normal. Deleting its plist does nothing. It's not a huge bug, because as far as I can tell, the actual settings themselves are being saved, but the launch behavior is annoying me to no end.

 

The bigger issue here is why this is happening in the first place. Is there something fundamentally wrong with Lion or some kind of problem that happened along the installation process? I did a clean install today and the same thing happened all over again. The most worrying thing about this issue is that I don't know exactly how far it extends, or how many applications are affected by this. My system is essentially useless if it can't remember any of my settings and resets them every time an app is relaunched or I log off.

 

Finally, am I correct that Lion's "reopen windows when logging back in" function is completely broken? No matter what I check it brings all my windows back. Or is this related to my problem outlined above? Thanks very much in advance for any help!

 

actually i don't know what's wrong with lion, when i first installed it, i had some troubles installing some software, and i found out that with some application i MUST move the preferences from /users/library/preferences to /library/preferences in order for them to work properly, on others i can't register and some working just fine.

i'm saying this because when i did a "migration" some of those problem vanished, and some persist.

strange thing is when i migrate, parallels desktop worked great, but when i uninstalled it, and then installed back again, it stop loading the kext for it on boot, so i have to use the special luncher for it.

about your problems, i can't tell exactly what's wrong, because here all above works almost without issues like this (but still some bugs),

only thing somewhere along the way got stuck in the booting is finder window at login, it always pops on login, no matter how many times i close it. but all other apps will not come back if i uncheck this option.

 

all i can say is there are still some bugs, actually yesterday i just told my friend how much i love new lion but there are too much bugs, 10 seconds after, my "mission control" got stuck the first time, when i say stuck, it was very strange behavior, i could somehow control the apps i saw in the mission control, but when trying to pick one, mission control didn't quit, tried everything, every key on keyboard, mouse, tried putting it to sleep and come back, tried to pop up the "usb removal" message to maybe cause mission control to quit, but it was stuck until hard reset.

 

so all i can say, that maybe it strange behavior on your side, but there are still some bugs, maybe this is one of them

[agrabarchuk]

Well for third party apps I understand that there may be conflicts. But system apps I would expect to work properly. The way it's acting now, my first guess would be that there's a problem with permissions, since it seems like the app itself is unable to properly write it's configuration settings. That was apparently the case with Finder and Dock, which I've repaired now by manually deleting their plists and letting them rebuild them. As for system preferences, I really have no idea. The entire app appears to be fundamentally broken in some way. So there's one of two things that could be causing this, IMO:

 

1. There was an issue with the actual installer that I used. However, I'm not sure if this is the case because I used the exact same file to install Lion to my MBP, and it has none of these problems.

 

2. There was an issue with the actual installation process or one of its components, like Chameleon or a kext or my DSDT or something. But like I said before, I followed the aforementioned guide precisely and no one besides me seems to have these issues, and the DSDT/kext/boot.plist/etc stuff was pretty much all copied from SL, which always worked fine.

 

So yeah...I'm at a loss. Maybe I'll just have to try a different installer file to rule that possibility out. Does anyone know if installing Lion via the USB Stick/Cham guide onto a freshly erased disk as opposed to on top of an existing SL installation would cause anything like this?

 

EDIT: I just deleted my System Preferences.app and extracted the original one from my Lion Install USB stick using Pacifist and it does the exact same thing. So...I guess I was right? Can someone upload their working System Preferences.app for me so I can try it?

 

EDIT 2: Something just occurred to me. I remember when I was installing SL on my hackintosh way back when, one of the points that was stressed heavily was how "Ignore ownership on this volume" for the USB stick HAD to be unchecked when preparing the installer. I just checked my Lion USB stick and sure enough, it's checked. Maybe this is why my install got screwed up?

[agrabarchuk]

Well, it seems I finally got everything working the way it should. Here's what ended up happening (by the way, as I mentioned before, for this installation I was using the Chameleon USB stick stickie'd thread) -

 

Like I said in my last post, I had a feeling that the "Ignore permissions on this volume" for the USB stick had something to do with my messed up install. So I re-prepped the USB stick making sure that this box was unchecked. I additionally ran MyFix on the pen drive prior to booting with it. However, something about these two things made it unusable - it would get past booting the installer but then freeze with an infinite spinning beach ball. So to get around this I used an existing SL install which had a working Cham boot loader, and selected the Installer through there.

 

Now, the crucial part about all this: The last time I tried reinstalling Lion, I noticed that my settings seemed to work properly after the first boot which had to be done using the USB stick (since Lion didn't have any kexts or a boot loader and couldn't boot by itself), but after making Lion bootable, the Settings/permissions problems occurred. So I had a strong feeling that *something* about using the USB stick to boot Lion for the first time was the culprit. And it looks like I was right.

 

Post-install, instead of following the guide, I booted up my aforementioned SL partition and FROM THERE, installed Chameleon/copied "Extra" folder and all that stuff to the Lion drive. After doing so, I booted Lion for the first time, went through the set-up process, and was greeted by a fully functioning system. Everything in System Preferences works perfectly, all settings stick, the Dock and Finder remember my settings, etc.

 

One last thing, I switched to Chameleon r1095 instead of 1083 or whatever that guide recommends. Not sure if it had any effect, but it seems to load faster, so that's always good.

 

So if anyone else is having similar problems, do what I did. The only caveat is that you need a way to access the Lion drive and install Cham/Extra onto it without ever actually booting it. For me, a separate partition did the trick.