[SOLVED] Debian Squeeze -- No Desktop Icons

[jguthart]

Obviously I'm not sure what's going on here.

I'm running Debian Squeeze which I update fairly frequently. Somehow Gnome is not showing my Desktop icons. I've checked and they are in my /home/$username/Desktop directory. I've also notied that I've lost by System-Shut Down capabilities as well.

I'm not sure if this is a bug with Squeeze or a permissions problem? When I run as root user everything works great which leads me to believe it's realted to permissions.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[reed9]

Well, I'm not sure about the desktop items, but the missing shutdown/reboot buttons usually means the session is having trouble with policykit or consolekit.

Are you using GDM as a login manager? (It's the default GNOME login manager.)

If so, create a new session as follows and see if it helps.

First open a new file as so

su -
nano /usr/share/xsessions/gnome-ck.desktop

Paste the following into it.

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=GNOME-CK
Exec=ck-launch-session gnome-session
Icon=
Type=Application

Save, log out, change to the GNOME-CK session.

[jguthart]

thanks for quick response. I put code in and received the following error:

Xsession: unsupported number of arguments (2); failing back to default session

I think the error is around the Exc=ck-launch-session gnome-session line

[reed9]

Well, GDM is supposed to talk directly to consolekit, so maybe that doesn't work. I don't use gdm anymore, but either SLIM or just startx from the command line. Both parse the ~/.xinitc file, and the line there is

exec ck-launch-session gnome-session

You can try reconfiguring gdm

su
dpkg-reconfigure gdm

This isn't an area I'm too familiar with. I know problems with policykit and consolekit can cause this symptom, not sure how to fix it.

Can you post the contents of /etc/PolicyKit/PolicyKit.conf and the output of ck-list-sessions

[jguthart]

thanks again for the response ...

I ran both code snippets above and none worked. I'm still having the problem of 1) no desktop icons appearing, and 2) no System-Shutdown option in the menu.

Here's my /etc/PolicyKt/PolicyKit.conf

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- -*- XML -*- -->
<!DOCTYPE pkconfig PUBLIC "-//freedesktop//DTD PolicyKit Configuration 1.0//EN"
"//hal.freedesktop.org/releases/PolicyKit/1.0/config.dtd">
<!-- See the manual page PolicyKit.conf(5) for file format -->
<config version="0.1">
</config>

Here's output from ck-list-session

Session1:
unix-user = '1000'
realname = '00Joe,,,'
seat = 'Seat1'
session-type = ''
active = TRUE
x11-display = ':0'
x11-display-device = '/dev/tty7'
display-device = ''
remote-host-name = ''
is-local = TRUE
on-since = '2009-10-03T16:21:03.939965Z'
login-session-id = '

Any help is greatly apprecaited.

[mrrangerman]

You can open a terminal and type gconf-editor or, (I'm not sure about sqeeze)

Applications > System Tools > Configuration Editor then on the left window go to apps > nautilus > desktop and check the icons you want to appear on desktop.

[jguthart]

thanks for the response ...

I have played around with Configuration Editor and have verified that the following are checked:

computer_icon_visibile
home_icon_visibile
network_icon_visible
trash_icon_visibile
volume_icon_visible

However, sadly, I still can not see my desktop icons.

thanks.

[MecoTom]

Hi,

I have arrive here trying to find an answer for (apparently) the same problem as yours.

I upgraded from lenny to squeeze yesterday, and I couldn't restart/turn off my pc from the gnome desktop, neither see the Desktop icons.

I solved this by installing the 'gnome' metapackage; it seems that the upgrade didn't install every package of the gnome-desktop. Now everything works fine.

[jguthart]

Thanks for the response ... I am actually glad that I'm not the only one with the same problem.

I re-installed the "gnome" package with the same results .... can't see any desktop icons and the System Menu has no shut down.

Anyone have any other ideas?

thanks.

[MercuryStar]

I am having the exact same problem.

I was using Lenny, and have now upgraded to Squeeze.

Initially, the upgrade turned on compiz. This is probably because I had previously had compiz installed, but not enabled.

Since disabling compiz again I now have
- no desktop icons
- no wallpaper
- and yes strangely enough no shutdown menu either

Now that you mention it, after the upgrade hundreds of small packages were marked as no longer required, so I did as I was told and did autoremove to remove them. Looks like they must have been part of gnome. No idea why the upgrade decided that packages required for 'gnome' were no longer needed. Installing 'gnome' package now and it seems to be reinstalling those packages...