Fedora 19 XFCE Desktop Background?
 

I just installed fedora 19 xfce and am perplexed at why there is an absence of any option to change the default desktop background. right clicking on it or going to "settings" on the aplication drop down list on other distros would show this option, but fedora has nothing. Anyone know what's up with this, thanks?

There might be a way (listed under Appearance?), but I thought I'd warn you that if there isn't, it won't be the only thing you're missing. Fedora has always been a Gnome distro (with a reasonable KDE) and the Xfce has always seemed like an afterthought. Have you seen the software installer yumex? — about ten years old and it feels it.

Do you know the fedora Forum? It's useful to belong there too, although they don't seem to have an answer to your problem.
http://www.forums.fedoraforum.org/

Wow, didn't know that about fedora. This will definitely affect my decision to use it. I like Xfce for my laptop because it conserves RAM and is less cpu intensive. I did sample the yumex installer and found it had issues. Howver, everything seems to be there that would normally be on an Xfce desktop just no options for changing the background image.

Would you be able to post a picture of your desktop with your right click menu?

I don't think so, why?

Right click on the desktop and choose "Desktop Settings..." . You can change you wallpaper here.

Why can't you? Is this because there is no right click menu?
I ask because i suspect that Nautilus, Caja or Nemo have been installed and are taking over xfdesktop and managing the desktop.

No, there is no right click menu. Right clicking on the the desktop does absolutely nothing.

Open up a system monitor and see if you have any instances of either Nautilus, caja, or Nemo running, and if you do, try to kill them. If these aren't running at all, try opening up a terminal and launching this command.

From my memory of Fedora 19, I don't think there was any Gnome stuff installed with the Xfce version. That shows when you try to get help in the configuration tools, which are mostly designed to use Yelp.

I use Xfce on my laptop — an IBM Thinkpad from 2003 — but that's Salix.

But it is possible he's brought stuff in as dependencies of other packages. In my opinion dependencies are a mess with Gnome. It's also possible he tried to change the file manager, because i'm under the impression there's a fare few people whom don't like Thunar.
Possibly he's also had a crash of some sought, which has closed xfdesktop, so he's rebooted and then xfce4 session has saved the running programs (which it annoyingly does) and hasn't loaded xfdesktop since.

I ran the command "xfdesktop &" and it yielded the output:
(1) 1663
Bash: xfdesktop: command not found

I did actually remove thunar and install pcmanfm. However, I thought that might have caused my problem and reinstalled it, but there was no change.

then do a 'yum install xfdesktop'

Ok, that brought back the "desktop" option in the settings manager, but if I select any image for a background it doesn't actually change it. I ran the previous command "xfdesktop &" and recieved this:

(xfdesktop:1659): GLib-WARNING **: (gerror.c:390):g_error_new_valist: runtime check failed: (domain != 0)
Failed to connect to session manager: Failed to connect to the session manager: Authentication Rejected, reason : None of the authentication protocols specified are supported and host-based authentication failed

** (xfdesktop:1659): WARNING **: xfdesktop: unable to connect to settings daemon: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.. Defaults will be used

** (xfdesktop:1659): CRITICAL **: xfce_desktop_new: assertion `channel && property_prefix' failed

(xfdesktop:1659): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_widget_add_events: assertion `GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed

(xfdesktop:1659): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: invalid (NULL) pointer instance

(xfdesktop:1659): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_signal_connect_data: assertion `G_TYPE_CHECK_INSTANCE (instance)' failed

(xfdesktop:1659): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: invalid (NULL) pointer instance

(xfdesktop:1659): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_signal_connect_data: assertion `G_TYPE_CHECK_INSTANCE (instance)' failed

(xfdesktop:1659): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: invalid (NULL) pointer instance

(xfdesktop:1659): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_signal_connect_data: assertion `G_TYPE_CHECK_INSTANCE (instance)' failed

(xfdesktop:1659): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: invalid (NULL) pointer instance

(xfdesktop:1659): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_signal_connect_data: assertion `G_TYPE_CHECK_INSTANCE (instance)' failed

(xfdesktop:1659): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_widget_show: assertion `GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed

Holy mackerel!
Are you mixing repos, or compiling software by source by any chance?
I'm sorry but i can't help you with those errors.
I find it hard to believe that Fedora would ship a version of their xfce4 desktop environment without xfdesktop; did you check the md5sum of the iso before burning it to disc?