[SOLVED] Gnome 3 Battery Indicator Missing

Question

I've been using Arch on my desktop for a few years now, and as of a couple months ago I'm also running Arch on my HP dv8000t laptop. When i log into Gnome 3 the battery/charge indicator is missing from the icons in the upper right-hand corner. I know it was there for some time just after installing Arch, but since then it seems to have randomly disappeared. I thought I killed it with an update but since nobody else seems to have this problem, I'm not too sure any more. To further confuse things, GDM shows the battery indicator just fine, it's only after I log in that it is missing. This seems to point to it being a problem with some configuration in my home directory, but I don't know enough about gnome 3 to know what hidden folder to look under. Running 'acpi' from the command line gives me a battery percent remaining, but not a remaining time estimate (however, I've never had any OS on this laptop give a remaining time estimate so that's not a big problem for me).
Basically, I'm looking for a) software that might conflict with the icon and cause it to not show up or b) a configuration file where it may have gotten disabled.
After submitting this post, I'm going to create a brand new user and log into it as a test of whether it's a configuration in my home directory or not.
Edit: I just created a new user and the battery indicator worked for it, which means it's probably something with my profile. I also forgot to mention that at the same time as the battery icon disappeared, my volume hotkeys stopped working.
Last edited by nullh (2012-03-30 16:27:12)

Answer 1

For anyone having similar problems, I discovered there was a permissions issue with my ~/.config/dconf/* files. I ended up just deleting mine and re-setting my settings (since I had only tweaked a couple) but I assume changing permissions back to something that my user could read from would also work.
What baffled me for the longest time was that there weren't (or I couldn't find) any error logs telling me dconf couldn't hit that file, which is why I never thought to check. Anyway, all is well now!