strange loss-of-control problem (n00b question)
 

i recently swapped from ubuntu to fedora, and for the last few days things have been surprisingly and impressively smooth.

but today, something screwed up (probably me) and now i cant access any of the .desktop etc. files that are in 'Computer', cant add launchers to the dock or change the background (which has been reset from my non-default one).

i am out of ideas of what might be the problem and none of my searches returned similar problems. does anyone know what is going on?

Are the .desktop files till there? i.e. in /usr/share/applications?

If so are the permissions correct? Should be somthing like this I think...-rw-r--r--
(amounts to 644 if I'm not mistaken) if not try doing a on that folder

Have you tried reinstalling the gnome-panel using rpm?

Just some ideas...

Cheers

aha. they are not in /usr/share/applications/

the .desktop files missing include filesystem (my linux partition) and the network places .desktop thing. also missing are my cdrom, floppy and windows partition .drives are also suffering the same problem.
when i double-click on any of them, nautilus (yeah?) claims that it is "not a folder and therefore cannot be opened".


as for the panel: after restarting the selected icons appeared. so i don't know what happened but i will just ignore it until it relapses.


the wallpaper issue, though not really a vital problem to machine functionality, is unrelenting. i can use any of the base wallpapers but not any i downloaded myself. even though these worked fine yesterday and still work in windows. (??)

Have you tried copying the pic to the /usr/share/backgrounds/ folder?
and then see if it shows up in the list of the Desktop Background Preferences Tool?

ok, i just tried that but it still didnt work (they didnt automatically appear and when i went 'add wallpaper' i found the file and it closed the browse window but then nothing happened.


are those .desktop and .drive files supposed to be in /usr/share/applications? i assume they are just links to / and /mnt/blah or wherever fedora puts its mounts?
but why does fedora need a .desktop file to do that?

in any case, how do i fix the problem of the missing .desktop files?

when i doubleclick the .desktop files in /usr/share/applications, gedit (or something) appears and shows what i assume is the contents of the .desktop file. could it be possible that fedora has assigned .desktop files as plain ascii text instead of whatever program they are meant to run with?

this could be why the files in 'Computer' claim that they are not folders and cannot be opened, for they are indeed not folders. i really know nothing about fedora and not much about how linux works. is this right? and er... how do i fix it?

Maybe it was something i did, the other day I:

- changed fstab to mount my shared windows/linux drive as writable, instead of read-only. but, i undid this change and the .profile and .drive files were still buggered.

- used the yum GUI to download a variety of programs, all of which were successful except for ethereal which i have failed to run in both the fedora gui and terminal. it also has no man page (??)

- downloaded a couple of wallpapers, bootskins etc. from a site i presume is trustworthy...

alright. i tried opening Blah->Preferences->Change Wallpaper, and as expected i couldn't load the image. i then tried dragging an image into the program. that also failed. they i opened the image in gthumb and used its 'Set as Wallpaper' option. That worked, interestingly.
so, i would like to find out what is wrong, but at least i have a way around the wallpaper issue. lol.

still no advances on the 'Computer' files though.

---
i went into the wallpaper choosing software again, this time to get the name of it so i could just replace it if it was dodgy.
when i clicked on 'help', the help window appeared but so did the readonly user-guide.xml file (what the?). i now have no idea what is happening...

Have you tried setting up a new user and logging on with that user to see if the problem is system wide or just your user?

Also the .desktop files have nothing to do with any mount point! they are just there to creat entries in your menu that is on the gnome-panel. They should be there if the menu is to work. the stuff that is in them is the oinformation about what Icon to use and what program to start when it is clicked also where on the menu it should appear (among other things)

Try uninstalling the gnome-panel and then reinstalling it. You should be very careful when editing your fstab..thats all the filesystems and parts that get loaded automaticaly at start...if this is messed up things get very messed up if you do not know your way around with out them.

Try the user and the gnome-panel bits.

Sorry for the lateness, I went on holiday.

Yeah, I tried that. I even made a new user and ran diff on the config files, to see if that was the problem. it wasn't (or at least, i couldn't see any problem there).

I think the problem is with the file types. I think fedora doesn't realise that it should open .desktop files with program x (i dont know what it is) so it instead thinks it is a folder for some reason.

This would also explain the opening of some files in gedit instead of Kpdf or whatever program they would normally execute under. It might also explain the wallpaper problem... As the images worked fine when i used gthumb, which must simply edit the appropriate config file. But when i right clicked the desktop->change background that screwed up for some reason.

Do you know how to fix this?

I inspected the 'Properties' of one of the .xml files and also a .html file. Both said their type was plain/text or whatever is normal. But when I clicked them to open, it said that it couldn't handle filetype "Unknown" so I opened the html with firefox (it worked fine). But then the .xml was set to open in firefox too.

What's gone wrong?

For most files Linux does not base its association of the programs based on extension...I really think that the Mime Type or file association is looking in the wrong place...If a prog needs a file it will look for it where it has been told to look for it.
So if the Gnome panel is not populating it self with icons and entries its either looking on the wrong place, the files it is looking for are in the wrong place, missing or it does not have access to them (permissions).

I think this is the problem but a reinstall of the panel using rpm should do the trick if its that. SO first uninstall and then reinstall.

The Desktop background is very weird and I am afraid I have no ideas there any more...Sorry.

If the install is relatively new I might sagest just starting over...maybe it would be easier.

Try putting home on a separate partition or drive. That way most of your settings are right back where you want them even after a reinstall of the OS.

Cheers

Yeah, I think you're right. The MIME types of the html document and the xml file where both text or whatever. (meaning that they would presumably run with the same program)

I also looked at the desktop and drive files again and they ran with applications/x-desktop or something and their types where x-desktop executables or whatever.

Awesome! So... How do I fix this? I don't want to reinstall because the problem will probably return.



P.S.
I suspect when Wallpaper Chooser selected the png file from my home dir, it did not know how to open it because it's type is fucked. It will probably be the same problem causing a number of symptoms as opposed to many problems causing many symptoms.

actually, nah, you're wrong.

I made an entry to /etc/mime-types of

application/x-desktop <tab> desktop

but that didn't solve anything. It clearly knows what MIME type it is anyway, since it says it when i right click -> properties. So I revert to my original hypothesis: that once the system properly determines it as an x-desktop application it doesn't know which program to run it with.

Does anyone know how to fix this???