Desktop program links opening as text?

[geo]

Yes, it's a fresh 7.10 OS install - I had to reformat the drive and I repartitioned it as well. But the home directories are saved from the previous 7.10 install.

I tried 8.04 but I didn't even restore what I backed up - 8.04 was simply too messed from the start to even try to restore anything. Half of the menu items refused to work, some aspects of the System/Adminstration menus refused to load. And this was on a clean new install!!

So I dumped 8.04 and reinstalled 7.10 from the CD, reformatting the smaller OS-only partition I just created. All of that kept me up until 3 am Friday night.

When that was running I then recreated all of the user accounts pointing to the second larger partition (which I formatted as ext3 and gave a mount point as "/home") and then I was able to place all of the user files back where they belonged.

When I backed everything up (I simply logged-into each individual account and copied the user's home folder - all of the hidden files too - to a removable hard drive formatted as ext3).

In my repartitioning scheme I've moved the users home folders to a second larger partition, permitting me to keep the OS and root user on a separate smaller partition.

Why? Because if I want to upgrade the OS, I really don't want to have to lose all of my data due to the fact that the installer really needs to reformat the drive. This way though, only the partition that contains the OS needs to be reformatted, leaving the user accounts safe on another partition.

When I login as Root user, I just noticed....the problem doesn't occur. The Root account is on the same partition as the OS. Is this an important clue?

I need the general "user experience" (including all of the fiddly passwords and nonsense) has to remain unaltered, especially important for Matthew (stepson) because he really spent a lot of time customizing the look of his desktop - days in fact - and he would not like it if he had to do it all over again.

Is there any file or specific files which I should look at in terms of correcting or deleting or something in order to fix this problem?

You mentioned Nautilus? Is Nautilus responsible for the desktop behaviour? If so, is there a way to force Nautilus to remedy itself?

(in the old Macintosh days when something didn't work right on the desktop you just forced the Mac to rebuild the invisible desktop database, something you could do with a certain key sequence. Does something like this exist with Linux as well?)

Thanks,
geo


It is as if Nautilus doesn't know the mime type of of the *.desktop
files.  Especially if it is a fresh install. 

Is it truly a fresh install?  i.e, all the OS and your home directory is brand new, or
only the OS was re-installed and your home directory was the one used
for 8.04 and your other installation in recent days.

If it's the later, I can imagine that maybe one of your previous experiment
corrupted one of the gnme configuration file in your home directory.

The best way to test this is to create a brand new user account as a
test, and see if the same problem occur in that account as well.




      
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