Locking icons position

[stratoka]

Thanks, it helped on Debian to.

[Jussl]

Hi guys,

I'm wondering if we can kind of "lock icons" on the desktop so they will not change positions when I play a 800*600 game.

You know, when you have icons near the left side of your screen and after playing a game your icons are all smashed to the right side of the screen.

Any clues? Thank's

Finally I came up with decent solution for this.

1. Create following script, save it to your home folder as "RunPreservingIconPos" and make it runnable.

#!/bin/bash
cd ~/.config/xfce4/desktop/
cp -f ./icons.screen0-1280x1024.rc ./icons.screen0-1280x1024.rc_bak

# This will launch application given as argument (as background process).
$1 &
sleep 1

# This will get PID of the application (if it launches multiple processes this script might not work).
PID=`jobs -p`
echo "Looking for process which has pid of $PID."

# Let's wait until ps doesn't see the process anymore.
while [ ! -z `ps -p $PID -o pid=` ]; do
sleep 1
done

echo "Execution of the process ended."

cd ~/.config/xfce4/desktop/

# These lines forces new configs to be read (apparently by flushing some config cache).
rm ./icons.screen0-1280x1024.rc
xfdesktop --reload

# Wait and restore backed up configs.
sleep 1
cp -f ./icons.screen0-1280x1024.rc_bak ./icons.screen0-1280x1024.rc
xfdesktop --reload

NOTE! Rename all of these "icons.screen0-1280x1024.rc" filenames in the script to correspond to your resolution in use!


2. Modify all problem application launchers to start with the script, example:

/usr/games/sauerbraten
--->
/home/<yourusername>/RunPreservingIconPos sauerbraten


3. Done. After one second you exit the application, all your icons will be just where you wanted.


If you find it useful, please share it.

[underkz]

Thank's for sharing your solution, that's a nice script! But I guess all lines with "icons.screen0-1280x1024" needs to change depending of the resolution adopted.

I really hope that XFCE or xubuntu will do something about it one day .

[Jussl]

Oh yes, you are right. Correct file names are dependent of resolution.

Do you know whether there is bug report filed for this?

[underkz]

If I remember right, I think there was a report filed for this, but sadly I do not find it. It seems not to bother many people, so I doubt it will be quickly resolved .

[Jussl]

Everyone who are bothered by this issue, please go and mark yourself affected by this bug. Then maybe someone will really fixed it.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...4/+bug/1190990

[Jussl]

Anyone still experiencing this problem with recent Xubuntu? Or should we close the report?
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...4/+bug/1190990