Re: After installing mono, launchers shown as .desktop

[Guy Rouillier <guyr-ml1 burntmail com>]

Guy Rouillier wrote:
> Guy Rouillier wrote:
> 
>>I installed mono yesterday on Gentoo AMD64 running kernel 2.6.11-r6.
>>The OS reports I am running  gnome core 2.8.3.  I'm able to use mcs and
>>mono successfully.
>>
>>However, when I rebooted today, all my desktop launchers now have a
>>.desktop extension (e.g., Thunderbird.desktop), and are apparently being
>>interpreted as text files instead of launchers.  If I right click and
>>select Properties, Type is "plain text document", and the launcher tab
>>is not present.
>>
>>I don't know why this happened, but how can I get gnome to interpret
>>these as launchers again?  The apps themselves still work fine if I
>>start them from either a terminal or the menus.  Thanks.
>>
> 
> 
> Something else is wrong also.  On my desktop, my mounted partitions
> properly have the drive icon, and when I select Properties it says it is
>  of type folder.  When I open up Computer, all the partitions have the
> generic icon, and Properties shows type "desktop configuration file".
> The label for each partition is appended with ".drive".
> 
> Ugh, what has happened with all these associations?  Help, please.

Thanks the the Gentoo Desktop Environment forum, I learned of this
command to reset the desktop icon behavior:

update-mime-database /usr/share/mime/

My desktop launchers are now working again.  I've subsequently
discovered that I can no longer assign a custom icon to these launchers.
In Properties, I can click the Select Custom Icon button, and it opens
up the selection dialog, but selecting an icon doesn't do anything.
Remove Custon Icon does work :(. I just tried creating a new desktop
launcher, and selecting a icon there does work.

I also tried editing the .desktop file by hand and adding the Icon=
line. After exiting gnome and restarting the assigned icon appears.
After i did this though, when I started gnome back up using startx, my
mouse cursor disappeared and my whole desktop froze. I had to power off
and back on. After powering back up, everything appears to be normal,
and the assigned icon appears. Is there more to assigning a custom icon
other than adding the Icon= line in the desktop file for the launcher?
Answering my own question: yes, apparently there is more. Although the
custom icon appears, the button to Remove Custom Icon is greyed out. So
apparently the association of an icon to a desktop launcher is stored in
more than one place - hmmm.... And by deduction, I'm surmising that the
difficulty is in recording this information in the "other" place, since
it never gets around to putting it into the .desktop file.

(A couple days later...)  Investigating the custom icon problem further,
I notice that for Home and Computer, which are of type "folder", I can
select a custom icon and remove it successfully. All the launchers I've
created are of type "desktop configuration file", and attempts to select
a custom icon are simply ignored. Finally, Start Here is also of type
"desktop configuration file", but I can Select a custom icon for it. But
I can't remove it! Very strange (and frustratingly inconsistent.)

So, now my question becomes: what component is responsible for handing
Properties?  If no one knows how to get this working again, I'll start
digging through the source.  Thanks for any and all help.

-- 
Guy Rouillier