How do I disable nautilus desktop?

Question

I am using nautilus on xfce and oneiric, but the desktop of nautilus shows up although I have activated it via gconf, e.g. by

gconftool-2 \                                                                   
--type bool \             
--set /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop false

I remember this had worked on previous versions of Ubuntu.

Solution 1

Install gnome-tweak-tool. There is a setting called "Have file manager handle the desktop" that you can switch off.

The configuration system has been replaced, so gconf won't work in all cases anymore. However, not all apps have been converted yet, so it's still present.

Solution 2

For gsettings based desktop environments (such as those that use the openbox window manager, as Shailesh has pointed out), the following gsettings corresponds to your gconftool-2 invocation:

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

Solution 3

The following command works with OpenBox:

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

The gconftool based command do not work with OpenBox.

Solution 4

I'm running openbox over 12.10 and disabling the "Have file manager handle the desktop" option in Gnome tweak tool was not enough. I also had to open dconf and go to org/Gnome/desktop/background and make sure draw-background and show-desktop-icons are not ticked off. My dconf solution without the tweak tool option did not work for me either. Both solutions are needed (in my case).

Gconf desktop/background did not work for me, nor any other configuration via gconf (I believe gconf does work on older systems).

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Comments

[jokerdino]

Does it work for all desktop variants? I was about to post this as an answer but I wasn't too sure.

[user530873]

Yes this should work on all variants.