No Desktop Icons, No Right-Click Context Menu

[Waggoneer]

I have a laptop and desktop, both running Fedora 9. And on both machines my desktop has no icons, even though I can browse to my desktop in a terminal and see some files I saved there.

Also, if I right-click the desktop, no context menu comes up.

Did some desktop manager crash or something?

I am running desktop effects on both machines.

[voodoodoc]

Originally Posted by Waggoneer

I am running desktop effects on both machines.

Turn it off and see if things go back to normal.

If your using Gnome, the thing that does the fancy desktop stuff like icons and context menu is called 'nautilus' (also the file explorer thing).

Try opening up a terminal and running 'nautilus' and see if you get any error messages.

[Waggoneer]

When I ran nautilus manually it would just launch a browser window.
Turning off and on desktop effects had no... effect.

I installed gtweakui and unchecked, then rechecked the "use nautilus to draw desktop" and that caused the icons to reappear. Hopefully it stays fixed.

[boot_img]

Thanks. I just encountered the same problem after update and reboot.

The solution from Waggoneer above worked for me

[JohnVV]

i have not used gtweakui since fedora6 it killed gnome ( required a reinstall )

[abobrien13]

I have the same issue with Nautilus as others in this thread. I installed 'gtweakui' and it did work at bringing icons back to the desktop, however, these settings do not stick. I have to open the program each time, make my selections, and then the icons will return.

Should I be using a startup script to turn on gtweakui's desktop control? It's a bit annoying to do it the current way. This issue appeared on my system after an upgrade from a stock F10 install.

[JohnVV]

gconf-editor i do believe has replaced gtweakui
and as i recall gtweakui never worked correctly for me
I would uninstall it rename your .gnome and .gnome2 and .gconf to ( .gnome-old , .gnome2-old , .gconf-pld )
then reboot and install gconf-editor

su -
yum install gconf-editor

[abobrien13]

I used gconf-editor first and arranged the settings, but they wouldn't stick. I then got the same behaviour with gtweakui. It's not too big a deal now. I got a new hard drive lineup so I went with a fresh install and I don't have any icon/desktop problems now. It is odd behaviour, I am going to check later to see if anyone has filed a bug.

[mythcat]

I see this topic is since 2005 , 2007 ...
The big problems with icons on desktop is "nautilus"
If you setting some session and you kill "nautilus" .
Another problems is "gconf-editor" go on "apps > nautilus > desktop"
Check "visible" and the name must remain <no_value>.