files from ~ shown on desktop (desktop_is_home_dir == false)

[Jussi Kukkonen]

Binary package hint: nautilus

The gconf key /apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_is_home_dir is set to false. Still, my desktop is full of files (from my home directory, ~/Desktop is practically empty). Also, clicking Places ->Desktop opens my home dir...

Restarting nautilus doesn't help, neither does setting desktop_is_home_dir to true and back to false again.

Background info: This is a fresh gutsy install, but I've copied the home directory from my old computer.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for your report, Does it happen with a new created user? It could be a broken nautilus configuration. thanks.

[Jussi Kukkonen (jku)]

> Does it happen with a new created user? It could be a broken nautilus configuration.

Thanks for the suggestion. I did some tests with a new user and figured out what happened:
Nautilus works fine for new user, so I started copying some config files over from my account and found the culprit.

~/,config/user-dirs.dirs had this in it:
    XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/"
Changing that to "$HOME/Desktop/" made everything work fine... I can honestly say that I haven't edited this file though. maybe some xdg-user-dirs-* script did this automatically at some point (there are no man pages for any of those scripts so I can't tell what they're for)?

So, My system is now fine. Thanks for the help. Feel free to close this if you think it's not really a bug (I'm sure this is somehow related to me copying my home dir over).

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Did you have the gconf key set to true on the machine where the xdg config has been created?

[Jussi Kukkonen (jku)]

Well, I don't know hwere the xdg config was created, but I don't think I've ever had desktop_is_home_dir set to true.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

if you remove the user-dirs.dirs file doesn't the key get the same value again?

[Tony Whelan (tony-whelan)]

I had the same problem - new Gutsy 7.10 install a day or so old.

I noticed today that my Desktop folder was now located in $HOME/.Trash though I can't explain how/why it got there - possibly my heavy-handedness deleting stuff in my home folder.

Used sudo mv to shift it back again ok, and that's when I found that the desktop was acting as if desktop_is_home_dir was set true (it wasn't).

Editing user-dirs.dirs as above will hopefully fix it for me.

[Tony Whelan (tony-whelan)]

The user-dirs.dirs procedure above resolved the problem for me - now I have $HOME/Desktop displayed again.
However I then found that my Home directory had a new folder named "file:" which contained subfolders /home/$HOME/Desktop

So I put it in the trash. The trash applet on the panel acted as if it was empty though the folders were definitely in there. (I've seen this behaviour mentioned on posts ages ago).

I deleted the folders from trash manually, and my several desktop icons (links) disappeared. Checked that the user-dirs.dir was correct and executed sudo xdg-user-dirs-update which restored my desktop to the way I had it just minutes before. Trash applet still broken though.

Restarted machine, trash applet working ok again and desktop all ok.
No sign of the "file:" folder returning so far.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The descriptions there are not clear, could somebody describe what he's doing exactly, what happens and what else he would expect?

[jcran-0x0e (jcran-0x0e)]

similar problems here. -- fresh gutsy install, noticed that copying files from various folders to the desktop was actually putting them into .Trash.

i emptied the trash and restarted through gnome. now, gnome was treating my home folder as ~/Desktop, and the desktop_as_home_dir option was not set in the gconf XML file.

some fiddling around with the gconf setting and restarting several times yielded nothing.

found this post and set the variable. this fixed the problem after a full restart.

i had copied over my home folder from a fiesty install. perhaps this caused the issue? -- though i don't remember these files in fiesty? these are part of freedesktop?

thanks.

jcran

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

could anybody try if that's still an issue in hardy?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to 'New'. Thanks again!

[Candle Jack (c-c-c-c-c-c-c-c-c-combobreaker)]

I have additional information on what causes this problem, reopening.

I was trying to get my home folder to be my Desktop so I moved everything in ~/Desktop to my home folder and deleted ~/Desktop. After a Ctrl+Alt+Backspace I saw that my desktop was the contents of my home folder. It seems that xdg-user-dirs-update runs automatically at some point to check if the env vars in "~/.config/user-dirs.dirs" actually point to existing folders.

The problem is that xdg-user-dirs-update checks if each folder defined in user-dirs.dirs exists, but it doesn't check if a default-named folder has been CREATED.

When I rmdir my Desktop and run xdg-user-dirs-update I get this:

/home/brian/Desktop was removed, reassigning DESKTOP to homedir

When I mkdir Desktop and run xdg-user-dirs-update I get nothing and user-dirs.dirs is unaffected.

[164747 (jacquet-david)]

Had the same experience on hardy. I had my sym-linked to a folder under an nfs-moint, but one time there was a problem mounting, so the Desktop was a broken link (to the a nfs-folder).

When this happened the file ~/.config/users.dir was either created or changed and the important variable here was set

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/"

Changing this variable solved my problem (home folder displayed on dekstop). So in my case, this may not be a bug, because it is not obvious what the system shall do when the Desktop is a broken link.

[rusivi2 (rusivi2-deactivatedaccount)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue that you reported should be reproducible with the live environment of the Desktop CD development release - Maverick Meerkat. It would help us greatly if you could test with it so we can work on getting it fixed in the next release of Ubuntu. You can find out more about the development release at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/. Thanks again and we appreciate your help.