Re: Default desktop items

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Fri, 2004-01-09 at 21:52, Andrey Tarassov wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I wonder how the default desktop items are created by nautilus?
> I would also be obliged if anyone could explain how to change the icons 
> that are created upon the first session startup and how to add icons to 
> a user's desktop when installing some software.

The trash/home/compute/volume icons are "virtual" in-memory items. You
can't really change those appart from enabling/disabling and setting
custom icon.

Adding an icon when installing some software sounds very anti-social.
The Desktop directory is meant to be one of the users primary working
areas. Putting unwanted files there would be very irritating, and will
be leading us down the path to the crappy windows desktop folder and its
(unfortunately required) "automatically remove unused desktop icons"
functionallity.

> I tried to add a desktop item to ~/Desktop and that nearly worked except 
> that the item was aligned to the very left and thus looked really weird. 
> Can the default position of the item be somehow changed or what should I 
> change in the nautilus code so that icons would be padded by e.g. 64 
> pixels from the screen edges by default?

This is more of a bug with the layout. I've seen it a few times, but i'm
not sure if it has been fixed or not.

> I've noticed that the desktop items' positions are saved to 
> .nautilus/metadata/*.xml files, but I suppose write there directly is 
> not a good idea at all.

Thats right. And it won't work either. Nautilus will not notice the
change, since it has a cached in-memory version of metadata for open
directories. It will most probably write over your changes even.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's an underprivileged Republican card sharp on the hunt for the last 
specimen of a great and near-mythical creature. She's a radical insomniac 
stripper with the power to see death. They fight crime!