lost much of desktop after installing updates

[James Takac]

On Monday 13 August 2007 00:40:55 Rob Lytle wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Brian Fahrlander <brian at fahrlander.net>
> To: "Ubuntu user technical support, not for general discussions"
> <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> Sent: Sunday, August 12, 2007 7:17:45 AM
> Subject: Re: lost much of desktop after installing updates
>
> Rob Lytle wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm new to the list, but not Ubuntu.  I did a fresh install of 7.04 last
> > night on this now Windowsless computer (yay!).   When I was finished and
> > rebooted the screen looked normal with hard drive icons.  I seem to
> > remember the dock having what looked like the usual icons.
>
>      Hard drive icons? I only have one of'em, I had to edit /etc/fstab
> to get it. (It's my backup disk).  Normally they won't come up, unless
> it's a disk in a DVD or something.  Is _that_ not happening?
>
> > Then I was notified that there were 111 updates.  So I installed them.
> > Now my Gnome screen is totally iconless and the doc looks like its
> > missing icons.    What happened?
>
>    Yeah, there's been a good bit of development in Feisty since the
> original CDs were burnt/put-into-isos. It's normal for a healthy, living
> distro....especially the development versions of the product. Dapper has
> very, very few these days; it's the long-term product.
>
>    Gnome (at least under Ubuntu- Fedora seemed to put a lot of'em on
> there) has no icons, by default. It's accessed by "Places" when you need
> it.  It's intended to keep the desktop clean, and it's probably a good
> idea, since it leaves all that up to you, and your choices.  But it
> sounds like the upgrade killed the icons you put there.
>
>    If worst comes to worst, you can always rm -rf .gnome* and
> reboot/log-out: that'll start you off with a 'factory' set of desktop
> goodies.  That's been part of Gnome for a long time, and is kinda
> comforting...

Hi Rob

That icon on your dock would be at the left of what you'd remember as a system 
tray. Basically you'll have something like pwer button, clock, speaker, 
network,...... maybe what looks like a single dot, big space a few icons, and 
finally your system, places, and applications menus. That single dot on the 
left of the tray area should be what is being referered to. It marks the 
boundary of the tray area basically to my knowledge

James