Desktop icons missing, right click doesn't work, the Places menu is missing the "connect to server", " Network Servers" links.

Many things were done yesterday, uninstalled-reinstalled samba, uninstalled-reinstalled java, (had to do for patch releases to install properly) installed multiple patch releases so I'm not sure what caused the issue. Another user has the same issue with the desktop.

I'm still in a Linux learning process so if someone has a place for me to check or something to try I'd be grateful.

You don't say what distribution you are using or what desktop... ? and stuff like that... LOL

Sorry. Using Redhat Enterprise Linux Server 5.5

So I assume you're using GNOME. In which case sounds like maybe some nautilus packages are missing and/or nautilus isn't working properly. Whilst logged in try opening a terminal and typing.

If there is no output from that command nautilus is not running. In that case try typing
and see what happens. Post any output here.

(Don't type the $ that represents your command prompt)

Yes I'm pretty sure it's GNOME

pidof nautilus returns
a blank line
and
nautilus returns
-bash: nautilus: command not found

Also did rpm -qa | grep nautilis

installed-
nautilus-extensions-2.16.2-7.el5
nautilus-cd-burner-2.16.2-7.el5
nautilus-extensions-2.16.2-7.el5
nautilus-open-terminal-0.6-7.el5
nautilus-cd-burner-2.16.2-7.el5

In that case I suggest installing nautilus. Not sure what the relevant package is called in Red Hat Enterprise but it should be easy enough to determine. It might very well just be called 'nautilus'.

1 members found this post helpful.

I went ahead and installed nautilus-2.16.2-7.el5.x86_64.rpm which did the trick.

Thanks.

I just noticed your edit to your earlier post listing various nautilus related packages you had installed. This makes me think you should look for other packages that should be installed but aren't. The nautilus-whatever packages you list will have nautilus as a dependency. So if you were to ask for one of them to be installed and nautilus wasn't already installed, nautilus would get installed. That they were installed and nautilus wasn't means your dependencies were broken. Which is Bad. That situation should not have occurred.

I'm afraid I don't actually know how you go about verifying dependencies on Red Hat. on SuSE distros you can use 'zypper verify' which will check that all dependencies for all packages installed are actually installed. The closest I can see for Red Hat is 'yum deplist'. But I'm not convinced that's equivalent.

One trick that should work to make sure you have all dependencies for a package installed would be to forcefully remove it then ask yum to install it again.
You obviously can't do that for every package though.

I got it working after installing "nautilus-2.16.2-7.el5.x86_64.rpm". Everything seems to be working ok now.