[arch-general] I'm having a brain far^Hilure... I can't find the XFCE control
I know it can be done. I've done it twice, once in Xubuntu, and once in PCLinuxOS... I've managed to turn off all the other annoying desktop icons. But I cant find the control to tell it to stop cluttering up my XFCE desktop up with iconic representations of my hard drive partitions. could somebody give me a clue how to disable them? Thanks! -- | ~^~ ~^~ | <?> <?> Joe (theWordy) Philbrook | ^ J(tWdy)P | \___/ <<jtwdyp@ttlc.net>>
Am Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:50:36 -0400 schrieb "Joe(theWordy)Philbrook" <jtwdyp@ttlc.net>:
I know it can be done. I've done it twice, once in Xubuntu, and once in PCLinuxOS... I've managed to turn off all the other annoying desktop icons. But I cant find the control to tell it to stop cluttering up my XFCE desktop up with iconic representations of my hard drive partitions.
could somebody give me a clue how to disable them? Thanks!
Right click onto the desktop. Then desktop settings -> Icons or Symbols (I don't know how it's called in the English version).
It would appear that on Mar 19, Heiko Baums did say:
Am Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:50:36 -0400 schrieb "Joe(theWordy)Philbrook" <jtwdyp@ttlc.net>:
could somebody give me a clue how to disable them? Thanks!
Right click onto the desktop. Then desktop settings -> Icons or Symbols (I don't know how it's called in the English version).
OK I tried that it got me to the same place as: PopupMenu->settings->desktop->icons Which is where I turned off the other icon types. this lists only 4 choices for: [ ] Home [ ] Filesystem [ ] Trash [ ] Removable Devices Unchecking the first three each removed one icon. The last would only come in to play if I plugged in a removable device such as a usb drive... I've unchecked ALL of them but there are still 12 icons sitting there. Nine of which are marked with a truncated form of the 9 labels found in /dev/disk/by-label I'm not sure what the other three are... But thanks for the suggestion, it is after all where the control "should" be... Hmmnnn Wait a minute! I just looked into the directory ~/Desktop and found 12 symlinks to some entries from my newly installed Enlightenment desktop... But I installed XFCE first. And I distinctly remember scowling at those icons BEFORE I installed Enlightenment {where they hide the setting to NOT display such icons in the filemanager setups of all places...} Still since more than one Desktop environment may put things in ~/Desktop, there should be a setting somewhere to turn off displaying them. I just can't find it. <Sigh> I suppose I could use a brute force kludge to get them off the desktop. There would be no point in removing the Desktop directory itself as it would just get automatically recreated. But I could delete the symlinks from it and then "chmod 000 ~/Desktop" which should stop anything but a root process from recreating them. But I have no idea if some desktop process will react poorly to not being able to use the Desktop directory. Yup, that did it! Had to restart xfce before they went away. But at least they are gone from my desktop... -- | --- ___ | <0> <-> Joe (theWordy) Philbrook | ^ J(tWdy)P | ~\___/~ <<jtwdyp@ttlc.net>>
2010/3/19 Joe(theWordy)Philbrook <jtwdyp@ttlc.net>:
I know it can be done. I've done it twice, once in Xubuntu, and once in PCLinuxOS... I've managed to turn off all the other annoying desktop icons. But I cant find the control to tell it to stop cluttering up my XFCE desktop up with iconic representations of my hard drive partitions.
If you don't want anything on your desktop (including files you put in ~/Desktop) just launch xfdesktop-settings, open the "Icons" tab and under "Icon type" select "None". There you have it, and you can even restore sane permissions on ~/Desktop ;-) bardo
It would appear that on Mar 21, bardo did say:
If you don't want anything on your desktop (including files you put in ~/Desktop) just launch xfdesktop-settings, open the "Icons" tab and under "Icon type" select "None". There you have it, and you can even restore sane permissions on ~/Desktop ;-)
Thank you "bardo"! Trouble is I just tried that and I still get icons for any files in ~/Desktop. I was glad to hear the concept (I was using my E17 desktop where it seems my un-"sane" permissions for ~/Desktop may have been interfering with the rendering of it's equivalent of what XFCE calls workspaces. That is until I restored "sane" permissions, the view from the E17 desktop had a nearly horizontal scratch like stripe where the colors of an adjacent desktop (workspace) bled through. I was starting to think something was drastically wrong with E17 (It's not officially stable you know, Hence I like to have XFCE as a back-up) When I read your reply and said to myself, "GOOD! That's exactly what I want. Anyway I immediately restored the "sane" permissions, noted that my E17 began rendering it's desktop areas cleanly again... Then switched to my XFCE desktop to test your suggestion... (Of yeah, since I'd deleted those links I copied a few .wav files from my music folder to ~/Desktop...) The desktop has icons for those .wav files... So I popped open the run command that I've got bound to alt-F2 and typed in "xfdesktop-settings". Which got me the same settings window as (pop-up menu)->settings->desktop. Then I selected the "icons" tab and made sure "Icon type" was set to "None". (Turns out I had already done that...) But in any case I'm still getting icons. Icons on my actual desktop kind of bug me for two reasons. 1) I don't believe that I actually think in **pictures. My brain doesn't literally have to translate a picture into the proverbial "thousand words" to grok it's meaning but it feels like it. To me most icons are just meaningless splotches of color. To illustrate this let me tell you I was very frustrated when all the weather forecasting sites insisted on substituting pictorial representations for the words (clear, sunny, cloudy, stormy, rain, snow, etc...) in their 5-day forecast. because now instead of being able to grok the whole 5-day thing as a whole, I've got to mentally translate that stupid picture into it's meaning before I can grok any one days column. ( And for some reason I can't seem to process more than one of them at a time so if I really want to grok the week as a whole I open a narrow terminal window with an editor running and type the 5 one word translations under each picture, then reposition the narrow terminal window until it covers the durned iconic pictures with the freshly typed translations. Then finally I can think about which day I'd like to schedule a picnic...) Result: I HATES icons. 2) My skills with any Rodent based pointing device I've ever tried resembles a two year old trying to color inside the lines... I just don't have the right motor skills for it. Thus I almost never actualy click on an icon... I'd rather type a command. I'm not the best typist either, but at least the keys stay put. (& thank God for spellcheckers)... I'll admit that I do better with a trackball or even my laptop's *touchpad (*once I've disabled all synaptic tapping and scrolling functions that is) than with a normal mouse. But even with zero acceleration set in the mouse configuration dialog, I have a hard time using the mouse pointer to navigate sub-menus... IE using my opera bookmarks for example: If instead of positioning the pointer the heck out of the way and typing my way to my bookmark for the Beginers'Guide in the wiki, I tried to get there by clicking on bookmarks, then selecting the Linux folder which would open on the right-hand side, then (if I got this far) I'd select the Arch folder (which would now open on the left side...) The trouble is that each time I need to slide the pointer sideways to the newly opened subfolder, I have a better than 50% chance of drifting vertically outside the lines of the choice that's holding the correct subfolder open. Thus instead of scrolling down my list of Linux:Arch:wiki-bookmarks I'm just as likely to suddenly find myself scrolling down my list of Linux:Bash:command-help-bookmarks **I note however that my brain does process some info from pictures (if the resolution is high enough to make it like a real world image) So if, for example I can set a different (familiar) picture to each of my desktop areas (workspaces) Which I use to group certain tasks. I can use the background to quickly see if I'm in the workspace I think I am before I start opening applications related to that task-group. I know the kde guys don't think people should think this way any-more. But it is how I think none the less... BTW I don't suppose you know of a way to get a different background image on each XFCE workspace??? -- | --- --- | Joe (theWordy) Philbrook <o> <o> | J(tWdy)P ^ | <<jtwdyp@ttlc.net>> /---\ "bla bla bla..." | \___/ "...and bla..." At least I know my mouth is running, I just can't find the off button!
It would appear that on Mar 21, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook did say:
Thank you "bardo"! Trouble is I just tried that and I still get icons for any files in ~/Desktop.
<big snip> Hunh? Now I'm confused. I verified that Icon type setting (which was already in place when I fired up XFCE today...) And I poked around doing a couple of other tasks that needed doing for nearly a half hour before I composed that last longish reply {which basically said it didn't work and added a *Lot* of verbiage about why I didn't want the icons cluttering up my desktop} Then when I thought I was done with my email I closed he nearly fullscreen terminal Alpine had been running in. and hunh?, the icons were gone??? They "*_WERE_*" still there when I started composing that message. And that was at least an hour since the last time I reaffirmed Icon-type = "None" in the desktop settings... They were I tell you. But now about another hour later they spontaneously disappeared... Is XFCE stable? Does it only process config changes at certain times of day? What could possibly account for it taking hours ( actually several reboots PLUS hours since I first made that desktop setting say "None".) for it to start respecting the setting???? -- | ~^~ ~^~ | <?> <?> Joe (theWordy) Philbrook | ^ J(tWdy)P | \___/ <<jtwdyp@ttlc.net>>
Am Sun, 21 Mar 2010 09:47:23 -0400 schrieb "Joe(theWordy)Philbrook" <jtwdyp@ttlc.net>:
Is XFCE stable? Does it only process config changes at certain times of day? What could possibly account for it taking hours ( actually several reboots PLUS hours since I first made that desktop setting say "None".) for it to start respecting the setting????
Xfce is stable. Changes at the .desktop files in /usr/share/applications (the menu) are processed only after Xfce is restarted or immediately by running `update-desktop-database` as root. I think they are also processed without restarting Xfce once in a while. I don't know if this also applies to the .desktop files in ~/Desktop, but I think so. Heiko
It would appear that on Mar 21, Heiko Baums did say:
Xfce is stable.
Changes at the .desktop files in /usr/share/applications (the menu) are processed only after Xfce is restarted or immediately by running `update-desktop-database` as root. I think they are also processed without restarting Xfce once in a while. I don't know if this also applies to the .desktop files in ~/Desktop, but I think so.
Well that only leaves me wondering why it didn't take the first time I set that to None... But as long as it continues to work like it's working now, then I really don't care... -- | ~^~ ~^~ | <*> <*> Joe (theWordy) Philbrook | ^ J(tWdy)P | \___/ <<jtwdyp@ttlc.net>>
Am Sun, 21 Mar 2010 09:15:43 -0400 schrieb "Joe(theWordy)Philbrook" <jtwdyp@ttlc.net>:
BTW I don't suppose you know of a way to get a different background image on each XFCE workspace???
That's currently not possible on Xfce. There's already a feature request for that in Xfce's bug tracker since more than 5 years. http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=369 Heiko
It would appear that on Mar 21, Heiko Baums did say:
Am Sun, 21 Mar 2010 09:15:43 -0400 schrieb "Joe(theWordy)Philbrook" <jtwdyp@ttlc.net>:
BTW I don't suppose you know of a way to get a different background image on each XFCE workspace???
That's currently not possible on Xfce. There's already a feature request for that in Xfce's bug tracker since more than 5 years.
That figures... Still, I run multiple desktops and to be honest I'll spend most of my time in either E16 or E17 depending on my mood... I used to install those to various kde based Linux installations (I still have a strong preference for a few kde apps) But kde lost me with kde4. And so far XFCE has proven to be a reasonable substitute for almost everything I used to like kde3 for. As a back-up and occasional change of pace desktop I can put up with only having one wallpaper... What's slightly less good is how well saving a session doesn't quite work. You see, I thought of another way to visually mark a few workspaces... I put the xdalicock on the upper left corner of one workspace, Put oclock on the upper right of another. Xclock --digital in the bottom of a third. And in the one I'd use foe music or video media I put both kaffeine & the default mixer... Then I logged out with the save session option checked. It remembered where to put xdaliclock & mixer. Both oclock & xclock wound up on screen center of the 1st workspace. And it wouldn't restart kaffeine at all... <sigh> Ah well, can't have everything. And like I said, so far XFCE has been a fair substitute for kde and a great backup to enlightenment. Well have a good one! -- | --- ___ | <0> <-> Joe (theWordy) Philbrook | ^ J(tWdy)P | ~\___/~ <<jtwdyp@ttlc.net>>
participants (3)
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bardo
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Heiko Baums
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Joe(theWordy)Philbrook