Fouled Desktop

[normfred]

I have, some way or two, messed up my desktop. Suddenly the folders in my /home/fred/ directory appear as icons on my desktop. If I delete them from the desktop I also delete them from the /home/fred directory.
I no longer have a desktop directory, the desktop and /fred directory seem to have merged into one directory.
Has anyone seen this before? How can I correct it?
Is this the correct forum for this question?
BTW, I am using Fedora 8 with all updates.
Fred

[Hlingler]

Wow.

Could be that your desktop is confused because the Desktop folder is missing (that's just a guess...). Open a file browser (Nautilus, Konqueror, whatever) and go to your home directory (/home/fred). There should be a folder in the called Desktop. If it's not there, create it (menu=>Edit=>Create New=>Folder, at least that's where you do it in Konqueror). See if that helps. You may need to logout and log back in to reset the desktop. If your desktop icons, background, etc. are missing, you'll probably have to recreate them. If the folder is there, just try logout/login, maybe that'll reset things.

Hope that works...

V

[EnglandA]

Actually this sounds like he has enabled the "Use home folder as desktop" option. Either use gTweakUI - Nautilus to turn this off, or go into gnome configuration editor and look for desktop_is_home_dir and untick it. Not sure if you need to log out for it to take effect.

[larcher]

I was having the same problem with Nautilus after I started it once with my Desktop directory missing -- my desktop dir is actually a symlink to another filesystem. I never changed the desktop_is_home_dir in gconf-editor or tweakui.

According to this ubuntu bug report, it seems like if the Desktop dir isn't there, it resets the desktop to $HOME in the ~/.conf/user-dirs.dirs file.

So if ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs contains a line like this:

 XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/"

try changing it back to

 XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"

[normfred]

Thank you all for the answers. The problem has been resolved by re-installing the Desktop directory. I still have not determined what I did to foul it up. I resolve to be more careful in the future.
Thanks again, normfred