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Short story: When doing a clean Natty install, is it possible to salvage the old desktop icon locations and bring them into the new user desktop?

Long story: I accidentally the graphics driver earlier today, but thankfully, Natty came out and I can do a clean install. All the files are backed up and there would generally be no problem doing that, except there are two other users on this PC and they have very elaborate layouts of the desktop icons. This is also why they will only use the Classic desktop. Just shuffling the icons is not an option. I can't make a screenshot of the current layouts, because, well, the nvidia driver is no more.

Is there a file where Nautilus stores desktop icon locations? A gconf entry perhaps?

Moshanator
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  • See this question and it's accepted answer: http://askubuntu.com/questions/573348/desktop-icon-position-programmatically-access-and-manipulate – David Jan 13 '15 at 19:52

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You can backup the panel copying the folder ~/.gconf/apps/panel or (a better way) 

gconftool --dump /apps/panel > /backupfolder/panelbackup.xml

And to restore: 

gconftool --load /backupfolder/panelbackup.xml

The icons are at ~/Desktop/. You can backup like this: 

cp ~/*.desktop /backupfolder/

If you don't want to miss any configuration, you can empty trash and the backup all the user home folder.

desgua
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  • I wasn't asking about the panel, just the locations of icons. Copying the folder doesn't preserve locations. Thanks anyway. – Moshanator Apr 30 '11 at 16:14