icons disappear

Forum: X and Fluxbox
Topic: icons disappear
started by: ducker1312

Posted by ducker1312 on Mar. 11 2006,21:28

I've got DSL installed to the hard drive. My icons flash by but will not remain on the desktop. I did a search and checking xtdesk was recommended. When I do this I get a response that xtdesktop/sterm.gif can;t be accessed. Is this the problem and how do I fix it? Thanks

Posted by mikshaw on Mar. 11 2006,21:58

look into /home/dsl/.xtdesktop. You should see several pairs of files. Each pair is a text file (filename.lnk) and an image file. Since your problem seems to be caused by a missing aterm image, I'd look in aterm.lnk (or it might be named xterminal.lnk or something similar) and see if the filename listed is the same as one of the image files in the folder.

Your problem most likely was caused by either the image file being deleted or renamed, or the lnk file was overwritten by a broken file. The older icewm extensions had a habit of doing this, and maybe there are one or two other packages that do it as well.

Another possibility is that the file permissions might have been broken....this is easy to do if you tend to copy a lot of files between linux and windows.

Posted by thebronzgod on Mar. 12 2006,15:39

Hey Ducker,

I had a similar problem when attempting to install icewm. That didn't work too well (I'm rather new to DSL so I still have to figure out what's going on to switch WM). So I reverted to Fluxbox. Anyway, I suggest you try running xtdesk. Here is what happened when I tried it.

Code Sample

dsl ~ $ -> xtdesk
Xzgv.lnk
Xpdf.lnk
Xpaint.lnk
Xmms.lnk
Vnc.lnk
Ted.lnk
Sylpheed.lnk
Siag.lnk
Rdesktop.lnk
Mydslgui.lnk
Ftp.lnk
Firefox.lnk
Emelfm.lnk
Dillo.lnk
Cpanel.lnk
Beaver.lnk
Aterm.lnk
amsn.lnk
xterm.lnk
Can't access file ".xtdesktop/xterm.gif"

So, I have renamed xterm.lnk, and re-running xtdesk starts up my icons...

Posted by ducker1312 on Mar. 14 2006,02:50

Thank you for the help. That was perfect.

Posted by captain_nemo on April 03 2006,19:14

Hi there! I noticed you had the same problem I do. I used MyDSL to browse for new(er) apps and I decided to download the icewm window manager. After I did all my desktop icons are gone and I have the exact same message. I tried renaming the xterm.lnk file but then it just goes down the list of the rest of the .lnk files. I'm having this icon problem whether using fluxbox or icewm; the icons might flash up for a second but then they go away. What can I try to fix this? Is there an uninstall to revert back to the way things were prior to downloading icewm? Thanks!

Edit: By the way, with the exception of the xterm.lnk file all the rest of the .lnk files appear to have either a ".png" or a ".gif" associated with them. From a quick look through about 3 of the files they are pointing to the correct graphic file.

Posted by mikshaw on April 03 2006,21:06

You should look through all of the lnk files to make sure they all point to existing files, including the lnk files that were originally part of DSL. It takes only one bad lnk to break xtdesk. I can't remember which one(s) got overwritten, but the icewm.dsl extension overwrote at least one lnk file in DSL. The image expected by the new lnk file(s) no longer exists in DSL.

If you want to try icewm in DSL, I recommend icewm.uci (currently in testing). Not only is it a newer version of icewm, but it also does not overwrite any of your personal files.