Ubuntu – Get xfce desktop back

10.04gnomexfce

I have ubuntu 10.04. After installing, I added xfce as my default desktop/windows manager. Sometime over the weekend, my computer turned itself off. (I'm not sure what happened, but when I came over to use it, it was turned off. Chromium said it wasn't shut down cleanly when I started it up again). Ever since then, xfce seems to be running gnome's desktop.

Specifically, it's using gnome's desktop background, it is using the gnome right-click-on-the-desktop menu, and not letting me use the scroll wheel while pointing to the desktop to change workspaces. When I have terminal window with transparency open, it shows my xfce background images as being what is behind it, even though that isn't what is behind it.

How do I restore xfce to its former glory?

Best Answer

I bet it was Nautilus taking over ! If it happens again terminate nautilus in task manager. If you want to switch to xfce permanently get rid of Nautilus in favor of Thunar or maybe PCMan.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Stop Nautilus managing the desktop (XFCE Desktop)

Try running this command in Terminal:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background show-desktop-icons false

Ubuntu – Switch back to pseudo-transparency

(In response to David's comment I offer this answer as a possible solution, as it worked for David and me with recent versions of Xfce.)

In Xfce, you can go to settings > settings manager > window manager tweaks and switch off the compositor, which manages transparency and the overlaying of X windows. You can do it via the command-line with xfconf-query:

xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/use_compositing -s false

That should give you back pseudo-transparency, as long as you are not running any other compositors and only the standard Xfce window manager. With compositing on I had full 'real' transparency with guake and with it off I had the old style 'pseudo' transparency.

You will also have to restart guake to see any difference. This is about the only way to do it I think, as there won't be any settings in guake itself as it is highly dependent on your own customised setup and whether you have compositing enabled in xfwm4 or in whichever window manager you are using on your setup.

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Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Stop Nautilus managing the desktop (XFCE Desktop)

Ubuntu – Switch back to pseudo-transparency

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