Help please with XFCE desktop deletion in Linpus

Hi My Friend has an Aspire One from Acer running Linpus and while trying to install some codecs to play avi files the desktop seems to have been deleted it is now just a black screen and when you click on the Home icon in the bottom left corner it gives this error
"Could not run command: "xfdesktop2" (No such file or directory)

I have already done a lot of searching around and found a way of reloading linpus through a USB pen but my friend has been traveling for about 8weeks and does not want to lose all his pictures, is they a way of saving those pictures to an external drive if this is not a fixable problem.



Cheers in advance

Dincolly

 

Hello,
I hope we are not too late.
Linux Format Magazine coverdisk has puppy linux (60? MB) that can be used with unetbootin to create a bootable usb drive.
It works for me. Then you can access the AAO built-in drives to save the User data. Make sure the pen-drive is big enough to get the data as well. Or put a second drive in the other port (I have an external portable drive for that).


/usr/bin/xfdesktop2 is run from a shell within /usr/bin/xfdesktopnew it could be avoided by changing a line in
/etc/xdg/xfce4-session/xfce4-session.rc
from
Client0_Command=xfdesktopnew
to
Client0_Command=xfdesktop-xfce

The other thing to look at before recovery is in
/home/user/.config/xfce4/desktop

the groups file can get corrupted during live update and lose icons. It is XML and quite easy to understand if you think of it as a shopping list with <group> </group> delimiters.

Again you can do these edits if you boot a different OS from USB an avoid recovery.
I had to recover because I stuffed the webcam with v4l and DVB-T USB stick.

Good luck,

Dr.Skids