Re: Help! My gnome desktop has been cleared!

[Paul E Condon <pecondon@mesanetworks.net>]

On Fri, Apr 06, 2007 at 02:37:09PM -0400, Mark Grieveson wrote:
> > I rebooted and my desktop has been cleaned off. All the
> > icons for the computer, my home dir, mounted drives and
> > some launchers I had set up are gone.
> 
> > Anybody know of an easy way to get back to where I was?
> 
> Some easy suggestions:  Perhaps starting nautilus, via the keyboard, 
> might help (press Alt+F2, then in the run application box, type
> nautilus).  If this fails, then close the xserver down, and start it
> back up again, by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, and then you can log
> back into gnome, and hopefully everything works.  If this fails, then
> maybe shutting your computer off, getting a cup of coffee (or a beer),
> relaxing for a minute, and then turning your computer on will work.
> 
> If nothing works, I do strongly feel that the coffee or beer (or both)
> will still help put some important perspective on the situation.
> 

Both this suggestion _and_ the previous suggestion of running gconf-editor
are important. You can turn off desktop icons in gconf-editor, and if you
do so while there is no nautilus window open, some logic somewhere will
shut down nautilus. Then if you immediately turn on desktop icons in
gconf-editor, they will not reappear until you also restart nautilus.

I learned from this thread how to turn _off_ icons. I am happy with a 
clutter free desktop ;-)
-- 
Paul E Condon           
pecondon@mesanetworks.net