Desktop icon problem on Xfce 4.10

**wgerven** · December 6th, 2012

Hello everybody,
I am running xubuntu 12.04 with Xfce 4.10. Lately some strange behaviour developed about my desktop icons. I have them ordered in a specific way on my desktop, but upon reboot, the DE doesn't want to remember this ordering any more. Instead, it just orders them the standard way from up to down, left to right. Regardless of whether I put them again in the right positions on my desktop or not.
Could somebody perhaps point out to me how to solve this problem? Would it help to reinstall my DE? And how would that go about?
Any help is very much appreciated!

Best regards,
Willem.

**Toz** · December 6th, 2012

Hello and welcome to the forums.

Have a look at this thread and LewisTM's suggestion about using chattr to lock the icon positions.

**wgerven** · December 6th, 2012

Hello Toz, thank you for your reply and welcome.
I will try tonight this suggested solution. I just don't understand where it comes from. At my work I run exactly the same configuration without this problem showing up. However, there is a minor difference: At my work my desktop nicely shows the preview of the pdf's on my desktop, at my laptop at home (which has the stated problem) this is not shown, although both are upgraded by this same way
http://www.webupd8.org/2012/05/insta...untu-1204.html
to xfce 4.10.
Any thought on where this comes from, whether it is related to my already mentioned problem and how to cure this?
Many thanks!

Willem.

**Toz** · December 6th, 2012

Originally Posted by wgerven

Hello Toz, thank you for your reply and welcome.
I will try tonight this suggested solution. I just don't understand where it comes from. At my work I run exactly the same configuration without this problem showing up. However, there is a minor difference: At my work my desktop nicely shows the preview of the pdf's on my desktop, at my laptop at home (which has the stated problem) this is not shown, although both are upgraded by this same way
http://www.webupd8.org/2012/05/insta...untu-1204.html
to xfce 4.10.
Any thought on where this comes from, whether it is related to my already mentioned problem and how to cure this?
Many thanks!

Willem.

Is it possible that on your home computer, another process is managing the desktop (i.e. nautilus)?

**wgerven** · December 6th, 2012

Hi Toz, I am not aware of any other process managing my de on my laptop. But I think I already found the (partial) source of my problem.
Together with the strange behaviour of the desktop icons I also noticed that gnome-do started to crash every time it started on login. It loaded but then didn't "get through". The keyboard shortcut didn't start it also anymore, and I had to first select it from the applications menu to start, and only after that I could use gnome-do by the keyboard shortcut. I thought this was an unrelated problem, but in some way it seems both are related. This afternoon I made a purge remove of gnome-do and then installed it again, and now both the problem with gnome-do and my desktop icons is solved!
I only don't know what caused gnome-do to malfunction, and how gnome-do is related to any desktop misbehaviour.. Any insights on this would be very welcome!
Anyway my initial problem is solved now. However, the problem with previewing the pdf's as described in my previous most remains.. (I once by accident installed nautilus, but then I again purge removed it, so this should be no compromise right? Or could this be a source of this problem?)
Thanks for your help!

Best,
Willem.