Disappearing spacefm desktop configuration

[Member grenouille]

Hi, I have an icewm Antix 17.2 live static persistence usb stick running on an X86 Udoo SBC. I initially configured my desktop to (F6) ‘space-icewm’. But now, after many reboots and changes when I click on ‘Menu → Files (or Files Manager)’ the Rox-filer pops-up
even when, on the reboot page, I chose again ‘space-icewm’ desktop with F6 because the system didn’t preserve it
or even when the system did preserve the ‘space-icewm’ configuration the Rox-filer pops-up.
How can I get spacefm by clicking on ‘Menu → Files’?

‘spacefm’ is installed as well as ‘desktop-defaults-spacefm-antix’
The second line of my file /etc/live/config/dmesg.out indicates :
[….] Command line : desktop-space-icewm vga=794 ...

I also tried out of the blue and without success: SPACEFM_OVERRIDE=TRUE in ‘automount.conf’
in /etc/skel/.desktop-session/ and /home/grenouille/desktop-session/

[Anonymous]

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change this selection, then logout/login and recheck whether the iceWM menu “File Manager” item now launches the desired application

[Member grenouille]

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By default I get :
Control Center → Preferred Applications → ‘File Manager’ : desktop-defaults-follow-fm.desktop’
A click on the list offers me no option with the word ‘spacefm’ in it
although I see a ‘rox-filer.desktop’ option and also a ‘file-manager.desktop’ option.
I tried the latter and after reboot, a click on ‘Menu → File Manager’ produces nothing this time.
Is there a different appropriate selection?

What is surprising is that persit_static preserves perfectly my lang=fr kbd=ca tz=America/New-York.

Is there a possible link with the fact that I almost, but not successfully completely deleted,the demo user and created a ‘grenouille’ user. I used :
Menu → Applications → User manager (to try to delete the demo user)
But it didn’t do the job properly and I had to suppress manually the reference to ‘demo’ in the files I could later found.
The result is that my login is now grenouille, but during boot I always see the line:
No default demo user found on the system
in the category ‘live-init’ and again in the category ‘live-usb-storage’ of the verbose message.

[Anonymous]

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It will be difficult for others to diagnose the nature and degree of the brokenness unless you post a step-by-step list of the changes you made.

==================
“no default demo user found on the system”
SLiM provides an entrybox where you can (should) now supply “grenouille” as the login name.
Possibly you had elected “autologin”…

From console, you can
sudo cp /etc/slim.conf /etc/slim.conf_backup
sudo nano /etc/slim.conf
and
Find the line that mentions “autologin”. Replace yes with no (can revert this later, if desired)
Find the line that mentions default_user. Relace demo with grenouille
Ctrl+X to exit nano and save.
===================

Toward repairing the remaining problems, I’ll suggest
sudo adduser grenouille
sudo addgroup grenouille grenouille
(the above 2 commandlines may require some fiddling, may be unnecessary if the target username and groupname already exist)
cd /home/grenouille
sudo chown grenouille:grenouille *.*
sudo chown grenouille:grenouille .*
sudo chown grenouille:grenouille *
(The first chown pattern may suffice. For good measure, do all 3)
then
grep -inr ‘demo’
…and prepare to spend some time replacing any hardcoded references to “demo” within the username // pathname strings of the configuration files for your various applications. In particular, mozilla firefox (its sqlite databases, and its user.js, and conf files of individual addons) may contain a lot of now-stale pathstrings.

[Member grenouille]

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Thanks @skidoo for the detailed answer. I will use your fine commands to work on my user and slim configuration. Also, by underlining the potential impacts of my many changes, you gave me the idea to make a new live usb stick with only my ‘locale’ spec. May be I will find the source of the problem.

[ugly solving]
I found inadvertently an inelegant way to get spacefm my default file manager.
By looking at the end of the file ‘/home/grenouille/.desktop-session/log’ I see :

desktop-defaults-run -fm –follow
rox-filer.desktop

I search and found, on line 9, of the file ‘/usr/local/bin/desktop-defaults-run’ :
fallback_fm=’’rox-filer’’
which I changed to
fallback_fm=’’spacefm’’
(The same file also exist in ‘/live/linux/usr/local/bin’ but is running and not modifiable.)

And it works!

[Anonymous]

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The same file also exist in ‘/live/linux/usr/local/bin’ but is running and not modifiable

Running? Hmm, we should not expect to find that script continually running. To check:
ps -a | grep ‘desktop-defaults-run’
Anyhow, in day to day usage, as a general rule, content within the /live path can be ignored.
The /etc/updatedb.conf configuration does mask tmpfs content so that it doesn’t show up in “locate” results
but we can still trip over (get confused by seeing) /live matches shown within “find” command results.

Kudos for finding a solution. Just bear in mind that desktop-defaults-run script may be overwritten (losing your edit) during future package upgrade operations.

[Member grenouille]

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My bad 🙁 the file ‘/live/linux/usr/local/bin/desktop-defaults-run‘ was not running. I added this information from memory but a check of the actual error window gives (my translation) :

Error when writing file
Error opening file ‘/live/linux/usr/local/bin/desktop-defaults-run’: files system access for reading only
The file on the disk may be truncated!

Besides :
i) $ ps -a | grep ‘desktop-defaults-run’ → produces nothing
ii) The file ‘/live/linux/usr/local/bin/desktop-defaults-run‘ has been automatically updated by the system with fallback_fm=’’spacefm’’

Thanks again for your answers and especially for the last info concerning the possibility of the file desktop-defaults-run could be overwritten.

[Member grenouille]

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One answer from @skidoo gave me the idea to make a new live usb with space-icewm desktop and to compare the content of the files between the old and the new stick before making any others modifications. I looked in the config files of my home directory (since in this case a true solution couldn’t be the hack of a script) and I found one solution (may be there exist a better one) :

[a better solving]
Simply changed the content of the file /home/grenouille/.desktop-session/default-desktop
from icewm
to space-icewm

And voilà! I get back spacefm as my default file manager.
We can see the result in /home/grenouille/.desktop-session/log
with the following changes by the system
became

8   desktop-session: save desktop code: icewm     → space-icewm
9   desktop-session: Exporting desktop Variables:
10 desktop-session: DESKTOP_SESSION_CODE=icewm    → space-icewm
11 desktop-session: DESKTOP_SESSION_WM=icewm      → icewm
12 desktop-session: DESKTOP_SESSION_IM=none       → space

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