Lost Desktop Icons in F11 [Partially Solved]

Steven F. LeBrun steven at lebruns.com
Sat Aug 15 04:23:59 UTC 2009


On 07/26/2009 10:30 AM, Steven F. LeBrun wrote:
> On 07/25/2009 08:16 PM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>> On 07/26/2009 03:51 AM, Steven F. LeBrun wrote:
>>    
>>> When upgrading from Fedora 10 to Fedora 11 failed, I did a clean install
>>> of Fedora 11 and restored my personal home directory including the
>>> subdirectory .gconf from Fedora 10.  I use Gnome for my desktop environment.
>>>      
>>
>> Add another user and see if the icons are getting displayed there
>> properly. If that works, then your current user gconf settings are
>> somehow screwed up.
>>
>> Rahul
>>
>>    
>
> Good news and bad news, the good news is that when I created a new 
> user, the desktop icons appeared as expected and therefore the problem 
> is in my gnome and/or nautilus settings; the bad news is that the 
> problem is somwhere in my account settings.
>
> The problem is not with .gconf by itself.  I have renamed the 
> directory and rebooting did not bring back my desktop icons.  
> Therefore, the problem should be in another set of configuration, 
> probably in another gnome hidden directory.  Hopefully, the problem is 
> in a single hidden directory and not a combination of hidden directories.
>
> Is there any documentation that would help me understand the Gnome 
> configuration and hidden directories?
>
> Note that the gtweakui-nautilus shows that nautilus is configured to 
> handle the desktop display when I log in.  Toggling that setting to 
> off and back to on restores the desktop icons.
>
>
> -- 
>   Steven F. LeBrun
>
> Quote: /"The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children 
> there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. 
> Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed."/
>      -- G.K. Chesterton
>

After obtaining a list of the hidden directories used by gnome, I was 
able to rename existing directories, log out, log back in and see if the 
desktop icons were displayed.  Through a series of trials and errors, 
the problem was in my old ~/.local/share/applications directory.  My old 
version contained 395 entries and the new one contained 2.

What is not solved is exactly which of the 394 files is the problem.  
Almost all the files in the broken directory are desktop configuration 
files along with a couple of list (text) files.   I did copy the wine 
subdirectory from my broken applications directory to the working one 
without a problem while resolving missing wine applications that were 
installed.

-- 
   Steven F. LeBrun

Quote: / "There are 10 types of people in this world, those that 
understand binary and those who don't." /

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