I'm running Mandrake 9.1 with Gnome as my desktop environment and am having a little problem. Whenever a program is looking for a file on my desktop, the first place I try and point it to is the default desktop folder in my home directory. This folder only seems to contain the default icons for a KDE desktop though. I have to point down to the /.gnome-desktop directory to see what is actually on my destop. Does anyone know why this is happening or how I can make the default folder point to the gnome desktop? Thanks in advance.

I would think if your using gnome, the correct desktop folder is the .gnome-desktop your pointing the dropdown to currently.

Right, but is there a way to point the .gnome-desktop folder to the default Desktop folder in my home directory? Maybe this is only a problem with Mandrake. Originally, the .gnome-desktop folder was hidden and when I was looking for a file on my desktop with a program, I couldn't see it. Just curious...not sure if you would link the two directories or if there was a setting somewhere that makes the desktop folder display what's on the desktop. Thanks for your response Tricky...I read your program installation sticky earlier and it was great.

If that's the case, just create a link say maybe called Desktop2 and link it to your .gnome_desktop directory..

cd ~
ln -s .gnome_desktop Desktop2

Then when viewing in your app to add or navigate to this directory, it shouldn't appear hidden.