Desk top missing

[Bart Silverstrim]

Leonard Chatagnier wrote:

>> Once you own them you can copy or move to them to
>> other locations in 
>> newuser's folder structure, like ~/Desktop, and they
>> should reappear.
>>
> Thanks, this just about clears up any issues/Questions
> I had for the new users home dir.

As long as they're normal files, they should reappear when copied into 
the directory (and have proper permissions). You should be able to 
compare by creating a document on your desktop and then opening a 
terminal and doing a "cd Desktop", then "ls -alh" and comparing what the 
  file(s) are and their permissions.

Some "special items" will not be there, like drives. This is controlled 
by magic elves...that is to say, I don't understand the mechanism that 
makes my USB drives appear on my desktop. I think it's controlled by 
Nautilus on my system, so items on the desktop (on my system) are a mix 
of that directory's contents and Nautilus's whims.

>>>  OTOH, is there anything I can do to also
>>> fix the old home to get the desktop back?  
>> Depends on what happened to it. Was it corrupted
>> from a crash? You may 
>> not be able to in that case. Or it may be something
>> so fubarred that you 
>> may be able to fix it, but the time invested will
>> frustrate you to the 
>> point of pulling hair out before this other "fix"
>> would work.
>>
> OK, understand this. It did occurr from a power
> failure so I'd better keep both homes available until
> I'm sure I want the new user home. IMWOT, if the files
> are still on the OS in $HOME/Desktop I should be able
> to restore  them to the GUI Desktop.  But I don't know
> that nor do I know what KDE file controls it. Maybe if
> I did, I could fix it myself and maybe not.

NoOp (Where are you, anyway?!? Usually you've chimed in by now...) was 
just mentioning on another thread about a fix where you can rename some 
.config files to restore defaults. He may know more about it than I do, 
but like I said when I started...this is how I'd probably end up trying 
to fix what happened to you. I don't know if I fully trust the directory 
with corruption by replacing a girder at a time instead of putting in a 
new bridge, so to speak.

>> No problem. We all run into issues at times, and
>> when it's our primary 
>> system it can be especially nerve wracking. You're
>> lucky that it's still 
>> usable if there is filesystem corruption or
>> goofiness in it...like I 
>> said, you may want to still look up doing an FSCK at
>> boot time. There's 
>> a file you can create (using "sudo touch") in the
>> root directory to tell 
>> Ubuntu to perform a repair at boot time, if you're
>> interested. You might 
>> find it in the Man pages. *DO NOT RUN FSCK TO REPAIR
>> A RUNNING FILESYSTEM*.
>>
> Thanks for this tip also.  A good idea. I'll RTFM. I
> am aware of the warning above as I once did it that
> way in my early Debian experience which caused me to
> reinstall. I'm going to e2fsck first right after
> reading the manual and hopefully don;t have to go any
> further. But if not successful will do the new user
> routine.  Thanks for all the detail.  It's much
> appreciated.

A google for something like "ubuntu fsck boot touch" should show a page 
that gives the step for creating the particular file to do a boottime 
fsck; I just don't remember it off the top of my head. Someone else 
might point it out. It's just a quick one-liner then reboot. The only 
disclaimer is that any filesystem repair may make the system consistent 
by completely wiping the problem off the drive, which means one moment 
your files are there and the next they're not. I've not had this really 
happen to me, but I know it's a possibility, so I'd be remiss if I 
didn't also remind you of that...try to get a backup *first* then play 
with repairs.

If you can't find the command to boot-check, let the list know and get 
my attention and I'll try looking it up for you.

Good luck!
-Bart