GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 518750
background not drawn in gdm
Last modified: 2009-08-18 10:13:32 UTC
The following change broke background drawing in the GDM greeter session: http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/gnome-settings-daemon/trunk/plugins/background/gsd-background-manager.c?r1=131&r2=144 This idea was to optimize the case where nautilus will draw the background by not drawing it first. One problem is that the way it attempts to detect if nautilus will be run is by looking at the gconf key: /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop This key is set to true by default so even sessions that don't run nautilus will have it set to true. The gdm greeter is one example of this. You can also imagine a kiosk type session that does not run nautilus but the gconf key is still set to true because the system has nautilus installed. ssp also pointed out that there may be other reasons why you'd still want a background pixmap set even if you do run nautilus, such as terminal apps that do fake transparency.
I don't think we really want to cater for fake transparency tbh.
Is there any reason why you can't just set the nautilus key to false in gdm?
I have this extact same problem. I'm trying to solve this problem to release my distro, OpenGEU Luna Crescente, an Enlightenment 17 + Gnome desktop. Since gnome-settings-daemon doesn't handle the gnome background and not even GDM does it, the result is that even running gnome-settings-daemon in E17, I have themes and icons applied but there's no gnome background, therefore I have no fake transparency in the terminal and other apps like fbpanel. This is bad for me and my distro. Only running Nautilus, with the gconf key: /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop setted to true finally renders the gnome background. But in my distro there shouldn't even be the shadow of nautilus. I use thunar instead... so, isn't there a way to set GDM to start the gnome background settings instead of nautilus? If it all depends on Nautilus than I'm in a real trouble with fake transparencies. Can't I solve this problem with another command? I mean, what is it that nautilus executes to have gnome-settings-daemon handl the gnome background? I believe that nautilus launches somekind of command because even if I then close nautilus, the fake backgrounds keeps staying there..
As far as I can see, Jens' question in comment #2 is still unanswered. What's the status quo with this bug? Are there any news? I feel that this kind of question should be raised on a g-s-d list or on d-d-l. As this bug is NEEDINFO for a pretty long time now, I'd like to either reopen and wait for discussion results or close it if it's already obsolete.
Hi, I assume this issue is OBSOLETE by now, as there hasn't been any reaction for more than a year. Please reopen if you have anything to add!