Help: Desktop icons can't be changed.

[Kiyan Azarbar <kiyan kublai com>]

Hi. I have started using gmc and the gnome desktop. I really love it,
but it behaves weirdly. For example, sometimes when in snap-to-grid mode,
I move an item and it refuses to go anywhere, it just floats back to
where it was. Same from within gmc, I drag to the desktop and it floats
back to the gmc window. What could cause this? I find that rebooting
solves it, for a while. (Not really rebooting, but restarting X)

The second thing, which is much more irritating to me nowadays, is that I can't
for the life of me get the desktop icons to change. They are all
the basic folder icon with the little shortcut/symlink arrow underneath.

I have right clicked on them, gone into properties changed the icon, hit
OK.... and there's no change. I go back into the properties menu, and it's
as if I never changed the icon. I don't understand this behavior... I checked
the permissions on the icon(s) I was trying to select. They're all the same
as the basic icon.

I then tried to manually create a whatever.desktop file in gnome-desktop.
I put in the Icon=/path/to/whatever.png ... and restarted X, but it still
doesn't work. It's really driving me nuts. I figure I have some remnant
of an old, non debian-package-ized version of gnome or gmc somewhere, that's
doing something weird. Here are the contents of my gnome-desktop dir:

palantir [~/.gnome-desktop]
$ ls -l
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx    1 kiyan    kiyan          11 Jan 24 03:51 HOME -> /home/kiyan/
lrwxrwxrwx    1 kiyan    kiyan           5 Jan 24 03:46 cdrw -> /cdrw/
lrwxrwxrwx    1 kiyan    kiyan           7 Feb  4 02:28 floppy -> /floppy/
lrwxrwxrwx    1 kiyan    kiyan           8 Feb 12 17:27 ftp -> /mig/ftp/
lrwxrwxrwx    1 kiyan    kiyan           5 Jan 24 03:54 loop -> /loop/
lrwxrwxrwx    1 kiyan    kiyan           4 Feb  4 02:28 mig -> /mig/
lrwxrwxrwx    1 kiyan    kiyan          15 Feb 12 17:27 mp3 -> /mig/linked/mp3/
lrwxrwxrwx    1 kiyan    kiyan          16 Feb 13 22:12 pics -> /mig/linked/pics/
lrwxrwxrwx    1 kiyan    kiyan          11 Feb 12 17:27 usenet -> /mig/usenet/
lrwxrwxrwx    1 kiyan    kiyan           4 Feb  4 02:25 win -> /win/

Everything else works, like mounting and unmounting from the right-click
menu, rescanning devices, etc. Oh, by the way, when I drag something
to the desktop and it lands there, whether it's a URL, graphic, tarfile,
or whatever, it takes the "piece of paper" icon (default file), no matter
what I try to do to change it. My guess is that for some reason gmc isn't
finding the icon directory. Even though I tried copying them all to
a directory under home, and pointing it to there. 

Oh yes.... in gmc itself, the icons work absolutely fine. Except I haven't
tried "changing" or overriding the file types.... pdf files have the pdf
icon, tarfiles have the tar icon.... etc.

Any help is immensely appreciated.

thanks, kiyan



-- 
Kiyan Azarbar
M.A. Program in Linguistics, University of Ottawa, Canada
kiyan@kublai.com (PGPkey ID 0x9A9EC5EA)