locks on FC2 gnome desktop icons
 

after using FC2 for the last few months, my desktop icons have become "locked"... the icons have little yellow locks on the upper right edge. the only icons on the desktop are the computer, user home, and trash icons.

the owner appears to have changed to root, even though i am logged in as a different user. this is not the first time this has happened, either. when i was testing FC1, just before FC2 came out, the same thing occured.

first, where are the definitions for these icons located?? second, how to change the owner back to user (chown obviously, but on what files). third, how did this happen (probably an up2date or yum upgrade)??

thanks
david

Try doing the following so that you regain ownership of your Desktop folder,

As root,

chown -R userid /home/userid/Desktop/* <ENTER>
chgrp -R userid /home/userid/Desktop/* <ENTER>

The icons on your desktop are stored in /home/userid/Desktop.

~/Desktop is empty
 

hi redazz,

thanks for your reply. unfortunately that doesn't work. the ~/Desktop dir already had the correct user and group permissions and owners.

in fact, the whole ~/Desktop directory is empty. that is why i'm confused as to the location of these icon definitions. they are the default icons from the base install, so i expect them to be somewhere odd. possibly in the gnome equivalent of the skel or .profile file.

Try to login as root (or as normal user in another desktop) and delete the hidden gconf files (rm -rf .gconf*) and then log into GNOME. When I have had some problems with GNOME this helped reset it to the default settings and then you can reconfigure it to what you want.

nope
 

thanks for the suggestion, reddaz.

tried it, but it didn't have any effect. it did change all the "chrome" settings (eg. theme, bar settings and locations, etc). also, it's probably better to suggest a mv instead of a rm, as it's easier to undo.

eg.
the icons still appeared, but due to the change in theme, were different icons.

if i could figure out where they are located, it would be a good starting point.

thanks again
david

true abou the mv but you can always reconfigure your theme at the control panel thats why I suggested the rm. Anyway your problem is puzzling me, but I'll try to think of a solution.

again
 

damnit, this is really begining to piss me off (more that it has already). on another machine (games machine, P4 2.8C, 1GB) with a fresh install of FC2, the desktop icons got locked!! the only things that were done to it were a few yum installs and upgrades (see list below), and adding the user to the sudo group.

i can't believe this problem is exclusive to me. has no one else encountered this before??

solution found
 

while helping a friend set up his fedora machine, i discovered the source of the problem.

adding the user to the root group causes these icons to be locked on the desktop. removing the user from the root group returns everything to normal.

don't know why this causes it, and it's frekin' annoying, but at least it's solved.