Re: Lost Desktop Icons in F11 [Partially Solved]

"Steven F. LeBrun" <steven@xxxxxxxxxxx> · Sat, 15 Aug 2009 11:33:40 -0400

On 08/15/2009 09:56 AM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:

  On Sat, 2009-08-15 at 10:31 +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:

    On Saturday 15 August 2009 05:23:59 Steven F. LeBrun wrote:

      After obtaining a list of the hidden directories used by gnome, I was
able to rename existing directories, log out, log back in and see if the
desktop icons were displayed.  Through a series of trials and errors,
the problem was in my old ~/.local/share/applications directory.  My old
version contained 395 entries and the new one contained 2.

What is not solved is exactly which of the 394 files is the problem.  
Almost all the files in the broken directory are desktop configuration
files along with a couple of list (text) files.   I did copy the wine
subdirectory from my broken applications directory to the working one
without a problem while resolving missing wine applications that were
installed.

    General tip for handling this kind of thing -

1) copy your existing ~/.local/share/applications directory to something like 
~/.local/share/applications_sav

2) restore one directory from the broken directory

3) if there are problems, you have identified the source.  Copy 
~/.local/share/applications_sav back to ~/.local/share/applications

3_sub) create the directory that you wanted to copy back and restore essential 
files from it, one at a time, until it breaks.  Now you have the real culprit, 
and must recreate that one from scratch.

4) repeat as necessary - don't forget to start from 1) so that you always have 
the partially restored and still working version.

Slow, yes, but you will get back most of what you had.  Making a guess at your 
applications most likely to have been in use when the problem occurred would 
be a good starting place.  Identifying the problem(s) at the beginning of the 
process is less nerve-wracking than getting a long way and still being unsure. 
:-)

Alternatively, use a binary search (divide the candidates into two
disjoint subsets, test one, then the other, reject the good one,
subdivide the bad into two subsets and repeat recursively, see Search
Algorithms 101). Requires careful bookkeeping but is potentially a lot
faster.

Also useful for finding broken extensions in Firefox :-)

poc

It was late in the morning, as seen at then end of a waking day, when I
finally found the directory that was causing my desktop problems.  I
had already used the method that Anne Wilson described to narrow down
my problem to the single directory ~/.local/share/applications,
renaming directories to effectively delete them but still had them
available.  I also used a pseudo binary search technique.  While I did
not divide potential directories in have, I did have an idea which
directories were not the problem and was able to narrow the search down
to three of the gnome hidden directories.

When I have more time, I hope to investigate what file caused my
problems in the application directory.  I did verify that the
application files involving my wine applications, both of them, was
working.  I will need to look at the other files to see which ones are
worth testing vs. recreating as needed.

One thing that does bother me about my ~/.local/share/applications-bad
directory is that multiple desktop configuration files exist for the
same applications.  The worst case appears to be for Audacious; there
are seven different desktop configuration files for it.

I suspect that my problem originated from my attempts to reorganize my
Gnome menus, using the "edit menus" dialog.  So it looks like I will
need to learn more about gnome and how it deals with its menus and the
directory and desktop configuration files.  The difficult part of that
will be figuring out exactly where it is all stored and how the
different components are related; what directories, what xml files,
etc.  Pointers to gnome documentation would be appreciated; I have
already started reading the documentation available at www.gnome.org,
GNOME: The Free Software Desktop Project. 

-- 

  Steven F. LeBrun

Quote: "Behold the lowly turtle," the astronaut had quoted.
"He only makes progress when he sticks his neck out."

     -- Ben Bova, from "Return to Mars"

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