Category Archives: Uncategorized

Converting from nautilus to caja desktop icons

I recently upgraded from Gnome2 to… mate. Let’s not get into the reasons, since this is just about solving the desktop icons.

So getting straight to it: in nautilus, all the metadata about files as they appear in the GUI (so: icon position, size, emblems, etc) exist in a series of files in $HOME/.local/share/gvfs-metadata
(each file in there related to a filesystem)

caja, on the other hand, uses the SAME FILES – but sometimes different metadata.

So, when I moved from gnome2/nautilus to mate/caja, I found that my desktop icons retained their same sizes, emblems… but not location.

Why is this so? Continue reading

new $HOME, state of the files

So I’m calling it. I think my systems are back up to speed – indeed, I’ve not had a failure in weeks now. I’ve been running my desktop from a spare account for a little while, and I think I’ll migrate this setup to my primary account and let the file cruft begin solidly again!

My setup is… gnome2 (thanks linuxmint, debian edition) with pekwm as the windowmanager (that’s /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager to you, gconftool), and xcompmgr to give me nifty compositing and real shadows on menus (so far, I’m toying with “xcompmgr -c -r 8 -l 1 -t 1 -o 0.6 -f -D 0.01 -I 0.1 -O 0.1″  :)

It’ll be nice to have my real $HOME as the foundation of my desktop again!