Disabling the show_desktop checkbox in /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop in gconf-editor also disables the desktop right-click menu (the one that usually shows "open terminal," "run command," etc.) but, worse, re-enabling the check_box doesn't get the right-click menu back. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): gnome-desktop-2.19.6-1.fc8 on a rawhide machine and gnome-desktop-2.10.0-5 on an old FC4 machine. (I'm assuming it's a gnome-desktop failure, but, just in case, the gconf-editors involved are gconf-editor-2.18.0-1.fc7 and gconf-editor-2.10.0-5 respectively.) How reproducible: 100% on two of my machines. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Start gconf-editor 2. Expand Apps 3. Expand Nautilus 4. Open Preferences 5. Click the show_desktop checkbox. (The mounted-filesystem icons disappear.) 6. Right-click on the desktop--no menu pops up. 7. Click the show_desktop checkbox again. The icons do not reappear (I just noticed that.) 8. Right-click on the desktop again--still no menu popup. Actual results: Both the desktop right-click response and the mounted-filesystem icons seem to be permanently disabled by turning off show_desktop and cannot be re-enabled by turning show_desktop back on. Expected results: Turning show_desktop off probably shouldn't disable the right-click response in the first place--all, I assume, it should do is kill the icons--but certainly re-enabling it should undo whatever disabling it did. Additional info: I'm only guessing this is a gnome-desktop problem. It could be a gconf-editor problem or, for that matter, some other problem altogether.
Happens in rawhide, too.
It appears that turning the "show_desktop checkbox" back on actually works, but only after rebooting the machine, or perhaps by otherwise somehow restating some app (nautilus?)
sure, if you restart nautilus, it picks up the current setting.
Not having a menu on the desktop when nautilus isn't handling the desktop isn't really a bug. How could it do anything on the desktop when told not do do anything on the desktop? Nautilus isn't even getting those events. The second problem is that turning show_desktop on in gconf-editor doesn't launch nautilus. This is not really possible to fix without say *always* running nautilus (even when disabled) just to listen to that confinguration key. Which makes no sense.