Mageia forum

My brother likes to use personal photos for desktop backgrounds. He changes them periodically, and rearranges his desktop icons to suit the new background. Always before, the icons stayed where he put them, but after changing to a new one two days ago the icons are now rearranged along the left side of the screen every time he reboots. Locking or unlocking the icons in Folder View makes no difference. I tried using the same photo on my computer, and my icons stay in place- even when they're unlocked. I'm stumped.

My brother's computer has a Biostar M7VIG-Pro motherboard, with Athlon XP 2200+ processor and 2 GB DDR2700 RAM, and an AGP 8x Geforce 6200OC video card. I'm using a Asus-made K8V-MX/s motherboard with a Sempron 64 3100+ processor and 2GB RAM, with the same model video card. Both of us are running Mageia 1 32-bit, fully updated - except that he had to drop back to a previous version of Flash-player from the repositories because the current version only worked part of the time for him.(That is probably a Flash bug, as the vendor's version does the same thing.) However, the icons always stayed arranged as he put them before this latest background change, and he was using the same Flash-player then.

Any ideas?

Are the icons sorted alphabetically? If yes, it looks like as very (really, since at least KDE 4.2) old KDE bug. I used to have the same on Mandriva 2010 with KDE 4.4, but it's been reported for 4.5 as well and as far as I know there was no cure for it... You may like to search forum of KDE, maybe there are some news there.
To rearrange the icons in the way I liked I had to give them numbers like "01. Writer" or "02. Trash".

Nope. No sorting done. Just repositioning. And it gets done according to the folder View settings - if told to align them left to right, it does that, rather than along the left side. But there's no setting for "don't align the icons." Maybe one should be added. But of course, that's a KDE thing, not Mageia.

Or at least worked around. Since the problem only showed up after using this particular image it almost had to rest somewhere with the image scaling. This was a photo that had been scanned at low resolution, then cropped to 859x466 for widescreen viewing. Changing the display mode from "Scaled" to "Scaled, Keep Proportions" (as it is set on my computer) scaled it differently, eliminated the re-arranging, but left narrow blank bars top and bottom of the screen.

Re-scaling the image with The Gimp to 1600x900, his monitor's resolution, eliminated the re-arranging and filled the screen as my brother desired, no matter which Folder View scaling setting was used - most likely because Folder View scaling is no longer needed.