Bug 596312

This is really curious bug. Generally, desktop background is set by gnome-settings-daemon initially after startup and then nautilus places a root window on top of it with icons and its own wallpaper. Crossfade effect should occur on this occasion.

There might be several potential intruders changing your background back to "default" - usually other processes managing backgrounds, like nautilus running under different user, other filemanager managing desktop (Thunar from xfce) etc. 

Do you see icons on the desktop when the change happens? Does it happen always on workspace switch? Does it happen after a timeout while idle, say in a few seconds? Does it happen when you turn the desktop effects off and stay with plain metacity?

I don't think it's related to nouveau, I'm running it myself and never seen the problem you describe.

(In reply to comment #1)
> This is really curious bug. Generally, desktop background is set by
> gnome-settings-daemon initially after startup and then nautilus places a root
> window on top of it with icons and its own wallpaper. Crossfade effect should
> occur on this occasion.
> 
> There might be several potential intruders changing your background back to
> "default" - usually other processes managing backgrounds, like nautilus running
> under different user, other filemanager managing desktop (Thunar from xfce)
> etc. 

I don't have Thunar installed on my system. And it's my work laptop, so there are no other users on the system. It's purely my account logged in once with my user account and session running.

> Do you see icons on the desktop when the change happens? Does it happen always
> on workspace switch? Does it happen after a timeout while idle, say in a few
> seconds? Does it happen when you turn the desktop effects off and stay with
> plain metacity?

It only happens when I switch desktops.

> 
> I don't think it's related to nouveau, I'm running it myself and never seen the
> problem you describe.    

I agree that this is likely not a nouveau problem - I installed the binary-only nVidia drivers and the functionality continued.

But I think it's related to having two monitors. When I have a single display then it doesn't occur. But when I'm on two monitors the pathology occurs.

I have exactly the same problem. I can change the background image but when I switch between workspaces it goes back to the default.

I use Fedora 13 and the hardware is Lenovo laptop. I don't have two screen but I mostly use my laptop in docking station which I'm not sure if qualifies as two screens.

I have more observations on this bug that is now seen in Fedora 14. If you have a single workspace, then everything works fine. If you have multiple workspaces, then if you change the background in the first workspace, then go to another workspace, the wallpaper fades away. If you change the background in any workspace other than the first one, then the wallpaper fades away if you go to the first workspace, but not if you go to other workspaces and stay away from workspace #1.

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