A First Look at Ximian Desktop 2 (LinuxWorld) [LWN.net]

Joe Barr reviews Ximian Desktop 2 in this LinuxWorld article. "A month or two ago Ximian asked if I would like to participate in a beta for its new desktop offering. I said yes, but only if it supported Red Hat 9. Ximian marketing folk said it would and swore me to secrecy. The following is what I found in the last two weeks: Ximian 2 is drop-dead gorgeous. It is much more powerful than it was before, and many tweaks are now in the interface. A couple of the tweaks I didn't like, but most I did. I'll get into those specifics a little later in the story. Let's start at the beginning."

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A First Look at Ximian Desktop 2 (LinuxWorld)

Posted Jun 2, 2003 17:33 UTC (Mon) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

From the article, Joe Barr speaking:

The Home, My Computer, and Trash icons on the desktop proper are permanent and cannot be d eleted. I really dislike them.

I dislike them as well. What I did to make me happy again:

tclark@bison:~$ rm -f .gnome-desktop/*
tclark@bison:~$ su
Password:
bison:/home/tclark# chmod 555 .gnome-desktop/
bison:/home/tclark# chown root.root .gnome-desktop/
bison:/home/tclark# exit
exit
tclark@bison:~$

Nevertheless, I guess Nautilus (a fine tool, but I don't use it) needs them to be there.

I've been running this way for months, and I haven't had any problems with Nautilus.

A First Look at Ximian Desktop 2 (LinuxWorld)

Posted Jun 3, 2003 0:35 UTC (Tue) by eyoung4 (guest, #4238) [Link]

Or you could add the following entry to ~/.gconf/apps/nautilus/preferences/%gconf.xml :

Substitute your account userid for "username"...

A First Look at Ximian Desktop 2 (LinuxWorld)

Posted Jun 3, 2003 1:27 UTC (Tue) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

mtime="1035496975"

magic number?

A First Look at Ximian Desktop 2 (LinuxWorld)

Posted Jun 3, 2003 15:02 UTC (Tue) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link]

It is the modification time of the gconf key. A detail you shouldn't have to worry about.

A better way to make the change is to run gconf-editor, and browse to /apps/nautilus/preferences, and change the setting. Nautilus should instantly react to the setting change (which won't happrn if you edit the XML file directly).

A First Look at Ximian Desktop 2 (LinuxWorld)

Posted Jun 3, 2003 15:19 UTC (Tue) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

Hmm, I don't seem to have a show_desktop item in /apps/nautilus/preferences. There are six items: start_with_status_bar, enable_delete, start_with_toolbar, start_with_location_bar, sizebar_width, and click_policy. Up one level I have start-state, sound_state, and preferences_version.

As an aside, running gconf-editor seems to crash galeon on a random basis. It's probbly not really random, but I have been unable to observe a pattern.