Show desktop icons

I've got the standard XFCE desktop, managed to change the wallpaper and customised the menu. I even managed to install VLC media player against astounding odds. I followed the direction on here and it did everything it was meant to do, except now I have a blank desktop with no icons. How do i show icons, starting with VLC?
Thanks.

 

It's difficult to help without knowing exactly what you did.
Can you say? and/or give a link to the page of instructions you used and/or type
$ history
in a terminal and paste the results here.

 

I suspect you've got something slightly wrong when editing the group-apps.xml file. Acer's stripped down desktop reacts very badly to slight errors of this sort.

The way round this - to get back to a basic functioning desktop so you can investigate from there - is:

- Get a terminal running (alt-f2 then 'terminal')

- Back up your 'new' group-app.xml so that we can look at it later:

Code:

cd .config/xfce4/desktop
mv group-app.xml group-app.xml.bak

- copy the 'standard' group-app.xml into your config:

Code:

sudo cp /etc/xdg/xfce4/desktop/group-app.xml ./ 

- Kill the desktop if it's trying to run

Code:

killall xfdesktop2

Then do ALT-F2 to get another command line (doing it this way is less complex than running it from the existing console as the desktop won't die when you close the console!), and do

Code:

xfdesktop2

to restart the desktop.

This should leave you with a functioning desktop, at least; then you can try to sort out what's gone wrong.

Please note I'm typing this without immediate access to my One, so you may want to check some of those file locations!