Gnome Trick!

I think Gnome is really great, but in my tweaking today I realised (strange given the time I have spent looking at it already) that the recycle bin had been moved from a desktop icon to an applet on one of the task bars. Whilst this was an interesting change, I felt myself longing for a less cluttered bar and a more noticeable icon. There is a very simple way to restore the recycle bin. The obvious way (which I tried first) was to simply map a new launcher to trash: – whilst this does give a desktop icon, it is a static icon which does not inform when the trash is ‘full’ making it functionless.

The way to do it can be found in this rather good book. With a simple check box the icon can be re-enabled under gnome 2.20 (and previous versions too but I have not tested this.)

To do this, enter the terminal and type “conf-editor” which will launch the gnome equivalent of regedit.

Goto Apps > Nautlus and select Desktop.

Put a check on trash_icon_visible and close. 🙂

Click on the image to see my full desktop. 🙂