I have seen similar posts about this, but no solution that seems to apply.

I have Mandrake 9.1 with the gnome desktop. I found when I rebooted the other day that ALL my desktop icons (folders, <username> home, trash, CD ROM, etc) have disappeared.

I can run everything via the gnome menu, etc.

All the folders and elements appear in ~/.gnome-desktop.

I have seen some answers that say I should run gnome midnight commander (gmc). But I don't have that.

I have seen several other answers that say to change something in Nautilus, Preferences, Desktop Preferences. The *small* problem is that I can't find that element when I launch Nautilus. The Edit-Preferences screen is conspicuously limited.

Thank in advance. I have the sneaking suspicion this isn't hard.

Leon

When it does this to me I just logout and back in. They are there when it comes up. I use KDE so it may not be the windows that is messing up here. Makes me wonder.

Hope it comes back.

Nope, I've done several reboots and also started the other desktops (KDE and Icewin) - while the other two desktops have icons, Gnome still is painfully, depressingly empty.

There's gotta be a trick to this!
Leon

Maybe check the permissions of that ~/.gnome-desktop?

SOLVED!!

So simple, so elegant, so obvious.

I just ran "nautilus" in a terminal and along with a file browser came all of my icons.

From there, I re-arranged everything and then logged out, making sure to check "save current setup".

Sheesh. You'd that someone would have put THAT in a FAQ somewhere.

Thanks to everyone who offered ideas

Leon

Ah, seems like someone may have told you to run nautilus --no-desktop to speed things up, but if you're using GNOME you probably want it to deal with your desktop

I don't ever recall running that command on purpose, but it could have happened in a script somewhere. I'm just glad to have everything back!

Leon