All my desktop icons were rearranged

[dobey]

Binary package hint: nautilus

I just upgraded to Karmic, and upon first log-in discovered that my desktop icons had all been rearranged. This is terrible behavior. I expect my icons to remain where I had previously put them. It seems that if I arrange them again manually, they will stay where I put them, but I have a lot of icons on my desktop, and I shouldn't have to rearrange them again.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report, when did you upgrade and what gvfs version did you get?

[dobey (dobey)]

Upgraded from Jaunty today. gvfs is:

ii gvfs 1.3.2-0ubuntu4 userspace virtual filesystem - server

On Wed, 2009-07-22 at 19:09 +0000, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> Thank you for your bug report, when did you upgrade and what gvfs
> version did you get?
>
> ** Changed in: nautilus (Ubuntu)
> Importance: Undecided => Low
>
> ** Changed in: nautilus (Ubuntu)
> Status: New => Incomplete
>
> ** Changed in: nautilus (Ubuntu)
> Assignee: (unassigned) => Ubuntu Desktop Bugs (desktop-bugs)
>

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the bug is probably an upstream on to report to GNOME

[dobey (dobey)]

I'm pretty sure these are separate issues. I want my icons to remain
aligned. Having "Keep Aligned" does not re-order my icons, but simply
keeps them aligned to the grid, rather than being placed at arbitrary
points. I had this option enabled in Jaunty as well, and I do not care
to disable it. What happened, was that after upgrading to Karmic, it
appears that Nautilus did a one-time "Clean Up by Name" action, which is
not what I ever want to do.

On Thu, 2009-07-23 at 09:39 +0000, Anton Kraus wrote:
> *** This bug is a duplicate of bug 399974 ***
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/399974
>
> ** This bug has been marked a duplicate of bug 399974
> 'Keep Aligned' option always resets to 'true' after desktop reload
>

[Giovanni Bortolozzo (giovanni-bortolozzo)]

A similar bug also affect me: every time I log in the icons on the desktop are rearranged.

Or better just the icons that correspond a link... the normal files and directory and the Home, Computer and Trash folders keep their position.

I have a Karmic updated to the latest avaiable.

[Giovanni Bortolozzo (giovanni-bortolozzo)]

As you can see in the attached screenshots, the position of all the link icons are resetted on a new login (I don't know if their positions weren't saved on the log out). All but the "video" link (on the bottom left) just because this is a broken link (it points to a directory in a filesystem the must be manually mounted after the boot).

Instead all the normal files and directory keep their chosen position.

Giovanni

[dobey (dobey)]

The origial report is not a duplicate. However, Giovanni's issue does appear to be. The original issue for me did not discriminate against symlinks or not. It reorganized all files on my desktop. (I use Desktop == $HOME)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The issue described there has been fixed in GNOME updates since

[William Anderson (william-anderson)]

my icon reset experience

This issue occurred on my laptop. I think that this is caused by either a corrupt configuration file or by a version upgrade that does not handle the old versions configuration correctly. At this time i think that the former condition is the cause.

I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 on 13 November from version 9.4. According to Synaptic, the version of Nautilus installed is 1:2.28.1-0ubuntu3 and the version of Gnome is 1:2.29.0-0ubuntu1 .

This issue started for me sometime in mid November. This was after the upgrade to 9.10, and the system worked without a problem right after the upgrade. The upgrade did not cause this problem.

What I think caused the problem was my filling up my home file system. Shortly after this (on the first reboot, which was a couple of days later) this issue appeared. I ignored the problem for a while as I only log out when I reboot or more frequently, kill the battery on the laptop. Today I decided to find and fix this problem.

After searching the web i found several bugs at both the Ubuntu and the Gnome bug sites with issues that seem related to my problem.

(Desktop icons get shifted after relogin at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=330298)
('Keep Aligned' option always resets to 'true' after desktop reload at
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=589156)
(Desktop icon placement reset at login at https://bugs.launchpad.net/nautilus/+bug/36244)
('Keep Aligned' option always resets to 'true' after desktop reload at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/399974 )
(All my desktop icons were rearranged at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/403130)

The older reports (from 2006 to 2007) are all closed as resolved and fixed two or four minor versions before the version that i have installed. Could this be a regression test failure and the reappearance of an old bug. Possibly.

On one of the newer bug reports, from July 2009, indicated that the problem occurred in one user account but not in another. To test this, I created a second user account on my laptop. When logging in, creating a group of empty files and directories and moving them around, then logging out and back in, I found that the custom positioned files remained in the same location that they were placed. This means that the problem is in the configuration files of the user that the problem occurs with and not a global software issue.

I then made a list of the configuration files that were created when that new user was created and logged on. I made a tar archive of those files for reference. I also made a backup tar archive of all of the configuration dot files and directories in my home directory. I then deleted the configuration files that were created for the new user. (All of this was done not logged into a gnome session and logged in to a terminal console session.) The list of files deleted at this time is .config/ .gconf/ .gconfd/ .gnome2/ .gnome2_private/ .gvfs/ .nautilus/ . Logging into gnome I found that all customized settings were reset (background image, home as desktop, window themes, etc), as expected. I then moved a file or two, logged out then back in. This re...