How to create desktop items in XFCE without using the desktop?
 

I know this sounds stupid but there is no way I can get to the desktop of the server.
However, now I want to create a link to another folder on that server desktop.
I assume that this info is burried somewhere in a config file of xfce? Does anybody know about this?

thanks.

Do you have a Desktop or .desktop folder in your home directory? I don't use XFCE anymore, so I don't remember, but maybe there's a folder like that somewhere.

I was just wondering exactly the same thing earlier today!

I've managed to create an icon on my XFCE desktop to launch a thunar window of a directory with the following file:This places an icon on the XFCE desktop called name_of_icon with the icon for a network filesystem (since that's what mine was; you can select whatever you see fit).

If anyone is looking for how to do this from within XFCE (the GUI-way!), simply right-click an existing icon on the desktop, then go to Desktop > Create URL Link, then specify the URL as the directory you want your default file browser to open. Choose a custom icon if you want at this point, as I don't think you can do so graphically once the icon's made, though you can edit the .desktop file in ~/Desktop of course.

Why, thank you!

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=Link
Name=usb
Comment=
Icon=network_fs
URL=/media/gast01

This was exactly what I was looking for. I could not find this right away in the xfce documentation but this is probably due to my bad search and/or lack of some basic desktop knowledge.

It worked for me in the ltsp environment, so now, I have this static access to the usb which is better than nothing. The fact that an usb doesn't show up automatically is probably due to the lack of a gnomevfs replacement for xfce?

thanks again.

You should be able to get Xfce to automount USB disks (mine certainly do) and have an icon on the desktop. The icon should appear by default and is essentially caused by udev, hal and Xfce working together, but the automounting is all Xfce. Download the thunar-volman plugin from you distro's repositories, and then in thunar, go to Edit > Preferences, then the Advanced tab, and you should be able to tick the Enable Volume Management box. Click on configure to launch the volume manager, and check all the options are to your liking :) They're pretty self explanatory really.

It is not that the usb is not automatically mounted, it's just that it doesn't automatically show the icon on the desktop that links to this newly mounted usb disk.
=> the volman plugin is already installed.

Do you happen to know in which file the changes done to the xfce desktop are saved? I mean the things you can (un)select from the "desktop settings" => behavior tab => show icons for: -home -filesystem -...
=> a grep learns me that this seems to be in the ".config/xfce4/mcs_settings/desktop.xml" folder

cheers!

As far as I can tell, xfce configuration is mostly in ~/.config, though I've never really delved through it.