The file manager (nautilus) handling the Desktop is not being enabled in live session

[Doug McMahon]

This has been happening much more often than not in recent weeks. Come release that image should have the Desktop enabled in a live session or you're providing a sub-optimal "Try Ubuntu" experience in 13.04
Todays live image is the latest to suffer from this, the beta2 release the same..

Still occurring now into 13.10

What happens:
No right click on desktop
No icons on desktop
Possible poor behavior in unity & compiz
Appearances panel is wrong one, as in gnome's Background panel

When using alt menu to start live session this doesn't occur
(- press any key at boot start up > enter enter

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.04
Package: ubiquity 2.14.3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.8.0-18.28-generic 3.8.6
Uname: Linux 3.8.0-18-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.9.2-0ubuntu8
Architecture: amd64
CasperVersion: 1.330
Date: Thu Apr 18 20:05:51 2013
InstallCmdLine: noprompt cdrom-detect/try-usb=true file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper initrd=/casper/initrd.lz quiet splash -- maybe-ubiquity
LiveMediaBuild: Ubuntu 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" - Alpha amd64 (20130418)
MarkForUpload: True
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: ubiquity
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Ubuntu QA Website (ubuntuqa)]

This bug has been reported on the Ubuntu ISO testing tracker.

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/1170483

[Nicholas Skaggs (nskaggs)]

I'm confused by your bug report -- what is wrong with the current builds specifically? Nautilus is running onload, and without a --no-desktop flag it's managing the desktop which is correct

[Doug McMahon (mc3man)]

Actually todays image it's not (& as mentioned more often than not in last month or so.
If you boot to today's 04/18 (amd_64 here), or the beta2 release you'll notice several things
No right click on desktop
No icons on desktop
Poor behavior of unity

Don't believe it has anything to do with nautilus.desktop, it an override in /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/10_ubuntu-settings.gschema.override that's not happening
[org.gnome.desktop.background]
show-desktop-icons=true

[Doug McMahon (mc3man)]

To maybe illustrate more directly -
rebooted to 04/18 image

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.background show-desktop-icons
false

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

I believe to reduce memory footprint we do "paint" the desktop background with gnome-settings-daemon and not having nautilus provide some functionality. I suggest to double check with #ubuntu-desktop folks like seb128 whether this is intended behaviour for raring, or if it's a bug to fix.

[Doug McMahon (mc3man)]

On 04/18/2013 07:24 PM, Dmitrijs Ledkovs wrote:
> I believe to reduce memory footprint we do "paint" the desktop
> background with gnome-settings-daemon and not having nautilus provide
> some functionality. I suggest to double check with #ubuntu-desktop folks
> like seb128 whether this is intended behaviour for raring, or if it's a
> bug to fix.
>
Well I'm not much of an irc person so someone should ask, ect. but the
intention isn't as important as the result.
Atm 13.04 is not ready for nautilus not handling the Desktop.
Putting aside no Hud on Desktop, no icons, no right click, & misc.
random user misbehavior, try -
disable nautilus handling Desktop on a default install or better boot to
a current image that does so.
open, then minimize a window, generally it will lock up
I don't think that's what should be presented

[Jackson Doak (noskcaj)]

could you add a screenshot or better explain the problem? i hardly understand what you mean

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[bwat47 (bwat47)]

The problem is when nautilus is not handling the desktop compiz totally freaks out and behaves poorly. Things like minimizing windows totally freezes until I hit the "alt" key which then "unfreezes" the animation. Unity/Compiz just acts buggy/bizarre in the live session. However if I open dconf-editor in the live session and check the box to have nautilus handle the desktop all of the problems go away and compiz/unity acts as expected. Compiz seems to expect this option to be enabled and barely works without it.

This is why it should be enabled for the live session. I have very common hardware (intel graphics) and saw these issues on some pretty recent daily ISO's. (think the last I tried was april 17th or 18th?). This should be easy to reproduce, boot into a live session with this option disabled and try to do some common window management like minimizing windows. These kinds of glitches in a live session will leave a bad impression.

[bwat47 (bwat47)]

Can also reproduce these issues on today's ISO:

Booted live usb
Choose "Try Ubuntu"

Issues I saw:
Dash will not respond to meta key
Compiz freezes whenever you minimize a window
And general bizarre compiz unity behaviour.

As soon as the box is checked in dconf-editor to allow nautilus drawing the desktop all issues go away.

[bwat47 (bwat47)]

This is something that should really be addressed before release. With the desktop icons disabled it triggers some huge compiz/unity bugs as described above (compiz seems to be designed to expect nautilus to be drawing a desktop window).

Simply minimizing a window in the live session totally freezes compiz, and the dash doesn't respons to the keyboard at all. as soon as I do: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background show-desktop-icons true in the live session, everything behaves properly. This would be a terrible, terrible thing to leave in a final release. This issue should reproducable for anyone, i've seen it on every machine I've tried the raring live session on. I can still reproduce it with today's iso.

[Rick Koss (rick619)]

Same problem with me on my Dell Mini 1012 Netbook. Is there a way to fix this? I was thinking of installing this permanently instead of running off the Live CD and my flash drive, but need web browser functionality.

[Adnan Shameem (needadnan)]

This problem does not occur when the boot screen skipped. When Ubuntu is booting it shows a keyboard = human icon. Press any key to bypass it. Then boot ubuntu with pressing enter twice. It will fix it.

[Rick Harris (rickfharris)]

In reply to Comment #6:
Based on this bug, 13.10 introduces a potential hierachical bug using gnome-settings-daemon-3.8.3~raring2-0ubuntu1

The bug manifests itself in 13.10 by exhibiting exactly the same symptoms as this bug even when 'show-desktop-icons' is enabled for org.gnome.desktop.background in dconf.

In addition, the bug doesn't occur immediately on desktop session startup - but after some use, all desktop icons disappear and this last window minimise freeze bug starts to appear.

Disabling and re-enabling 'show-desktop-icons' dconf entry for org.gnome.desktop.background mentioned above works around the bug.

Disabling the following Ubuntu patches for gnome-settings-daemon fixes this:
revert_background_dropping.patch
52_sync_background_to_accountsservice.patch
git_revert_remove_automount_helper.patch

But we're still left with the original bug of needing 'show-desktop-icons' dconf entry for org.gnome.desktop.background enabled.

Feel free to link this bug to any other bugs that share the same symptom...

[Rick Harris (rickfharris)]

Still present in Saucy gnome-settings-daemon-3.8.5 0ubuntu9.

Related bug here -> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-gnome/+bug/1198658

The gnome-settings-daemon patches mentioned above cause nautilus to segfault which to the user appears as no icons on the desktop.

With those patches disabled, nautilus does not segfault.

[Maurice Clerc (maurice-clerc)]

Still present in Ubuntu 14.10. I checked: Nautilus managing the Desktop is on, but no icons. Even the command
nautilus --force-desktop
has no effect.

[maxwellcom (ndmaxwell)]

The same behavior happens to me on 14.10.

I had been using a desktop wallpaper client (Wallch). After disabling Wallch and setting the desktop background to a solid color, the behavior ceased. Reactivating the wallpaper client causes the behavior to return.