Prevent Xfce from darwing desktop background

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On 05/13/2009 11:38 PM, andreas at an3as.eu wrote:
> On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 02:13:02PM -0700, Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
>> andreas at an3as.eu wrote:
>>
>> Well, if it worked with 4.4, I don't really know why it doesn't work
>> now.  4.6 did not see many (any?) changes with the icon view.
>
> The icon view is the same but XFCE is not only drawing icons but also
> an optional image r background color.  In version 4.4 there was an option
> like "Xfce handles the desktop" (well I just have German locale so
> this is not the exact string - it was right on top of the desktop
> settings).  If you unset this option the remaining settings for images
> etc became grayed out so you were not able to set any background image
> or color ... and xplaned took over rendering of the background.

When you unset that option in 4.4 xfdesktop quits completely, so xplanet 
ends up drawing either a) to the X root window directly, or b) to a 
window it creates itself (depends on how you run xplanet, I believe). 
In this case, you lose the desktop right- and middle-click menus.  If 
you're fine with this (which presumably you are, since you operated this 
way with 4.4), simply run "xfdesktop --quit" from a terminal and save 
your session when you log out.

>> Are you telling xplanet to draw to xfdesktop's window?  If not, why not?
>>   If not, I don't see how it ever worked in 4.4.
>
> I have no ideao how I could tell this.

Then you need to get googling.  This topic has been discussed several 
times over the past few years.

>> Well, how often does it change?  It really doesn't matter one bit; you
>> can automate the entire thing.
>
> Well, if I'm forced to start investigating how to work around a feature
> that is missing in a new version which was perfectly available in the
> old version I would save my time and tag the old xfce version on hold on
> my Debian machine.  That's no big deal.

Well, seeing as it's a feature that you were mistaken existed...

>> Feel free to open a feature request on bugzilla; I may or may not get to
>> it.  Someone else is free to write a patch, too, of course ^_~.
>
> I can do this but I just want to make sure that you *really* understood
> what my problem is because this does not seem tp be the case regarding
> the questions you asked above.  Perhaps just an option id simply lacking
> from the configuration menu but nobody noticed before.  I even would
> be fine to tweak the resulting config files if I would know what the
> option might be.

Well, we both did misunderstand, but this might still be a useful 
feature, for people who want to use xplanet (or something similar), but 
still want access to the menus.  Up to you if you feel like following up 
with a feature request.

	-brian