Nautilus forcing its own Desktop in Xubuntu?

[neu5eeCh]

I installed Nautilus Elementary in Xubuntu. The problem is that Nautilus insists on starting up its own desktop (overlaying? Xubuntu's desktop). How do I prevent this (without uninstalling Nautilus?). Right now, I can't see my normal desktop, and there are no titlebars. Everything's a mess.

Also: How do I restart the window manager from the command line in Xubuntu?

[VCoolio]

launch nautilus like this:

nautilus --no-desktop

[hhh]

There's another way which doesn't use --no-desktop, I like it better since you don't have to mess with the Nautilus .desktop file and it's helpful in case you forget --no-desktop or if another program tries to open Nautilus...

You've noticed that if you kill Nautilus it just respawns and takes over the desktop again. In Xfce4 Settings Manager>>Session and Startup>>Session, set Nautilus>>Restart Style to "Never" and then kill Nautilus. While you're there, do the same to Thunar since you'll be using it infrequently and I haven't noticed any dramatic speed decrease from not having the daemon running.

Now run the following 2 commands in a terminal...

gconftool-2 -s -t bool /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop false &

gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/background/draw_background false &

You can now start Nautilus normally and it won't take over. Do so to get the daemon running and then log out and "Save session for future logins". Nautilus takes a second to open the first time you use it in a session, it's about as fast as Thunar after that.

You can undo the gconf commands by substituting the word false with true.

To change desktop wallpapers, either use Xfce4 Settings Manager>>Desktop or open Thunar, right-click an image and choose "Set as wallpaper".

Hope that helps.

[neu5eeCh]

Thanks HHH. I was out this evening. I'm back now. I was able to reset Nautilus and Thunar to Never, but the window manager doesn't seem to be starting (no titlebars, keyboard shortcuts, etc....) I can't type anything in the terminal or ALT-F2. I can't do squat until I get the window manager working.

Edit: I finally was able to get into a terminal by right clicking on the desktop and choosing "Open Terminal Here". From there, I typed XFWM4 (after trying a number of other options). This worked. Now I can try your other directions.

Edit: OK... thread marked as solved. Thank you HHH. Everything is back to normal. Phew. How the heck do you know this stuff?

[hhh]

How the heck do you know this stuff?

I've been using Xfce for about a year now, and slowly learning to customize it...mostly trial and error, some help from this and other forums, a bit from the Xfce Wiki...
http://wiki.xfce.org/

I don't bother with the Xfce forum (they didn't even accept my registration, I have no idea why), and I don't use IRC, but you can always try those avenues too. Feel free to PM me with questions, I might not know the answer but it can't hurt.

Oh yeah, it's hhh, no affiliation with the wrestler!

[TNAFan]

Oh yeah, it's hhh, no affiliation with the wrestler!

I was seriously going to get a hold of him and ask if it was.

[ohan_g9]

You've noticed that if you kill Nautilus it just respawns and takes over the desktop again. In Xfce4 Settings Manager>>Session and Startup>>Session, set Nautilus>>Restart Style to "Never" and then kill Nautilus.

The problem with that solution is that next time you start Nautilus it comes back with a new PID, and again it has by default auto restart set to "IMMEDIATELY".

SOULUTION!:

sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/nautilus.desktop

In it, change this row:

X-GNOME-AutoRestart=false

(found it at: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=119254 )