Further to my other investigations ( as in getting a iMac to play nicely )
I discovered that the iMac was trying NFS3 on my server. This server exports
home directories and 3 other as NFS4 which the Linux boxes see as

/home/whoever

the Imac sees

/shared/home/whoever

Which led me to the idea to turn off NFS3 on my server since my automaps all specify nfs4. Thereby ( I assumed ) forcing the iMac to use NFS4. Now the interesting side effect is that my Linux box running KDE still works fine but the icons on the desktop folder have changed to cog wheels and nothing I do can seem to restore the icons.

If you go to the properties on the link the icon shows correctly or if you change it to something else that seems to work in the properties box but when you click OK it's still a cog wheel icon. Putting NFS3 back on my server and rebooting everything does fix it either

has anyone any ideas on this

Ta

Mal

PS the links still work

Try removing ~/.thumbnails and /var/tmp/kdecache-$USER/ outside KDE.

Sorry, that didn't do anything, I still have cog wheels.

Why should disabling nfs3 on the server have this effect
even when there are no nfs3 mounts in the automaps ?

Puzzled !

Mal

OK, I'm even more confused now

I reinstalled the client ( openSuse 12.1 ) from the DVD and
deleted everything in the users home directories on the server
and the icons are still cog wheels. ( for all users )

All I did was turn off nfs3 for a few minutes by editing
/etc/sysconfig/nfs and changing the NFS3_SERVER_SUPPORT to 'no'

Mal

Try checking the permissions of the *.desktop files. They need to be executable.

They are executable....

Mal

PS

Also users that have never logged in before get the cogs so their
home directories are empty. Everything else works it's just the
folder view widget

PPS

Does it matter that the client is sometimes 32 bit and sometimes 64 bit
depending on which machine I log in from ( as the home directory is
on a NFS export )

PPPS

Now isn't that interesting. I installed openSuse 11.4 on the client machine
which comes with kde 4.6 out of the box and everything was fine The icons were there in all their glory. I then updated to 4.7.4 from opensuses repos and the icon have gone back to cogs.

The architecture shouldn't make a difference. Can you please check the mounting options (noexec mainly) on the client to ensure that execution privileges are not being denied at that level?

It's got to be KDE 4.7.4. I've tried opensuse 11.4 and 12.1 and
everything works fine up to 4.7.2 as soon as you put 4.7.4 the icons
go to cogs. Root is ok and anyone who has a local home directory.
Anyone that has a NFS home drive be it NFS3 or NFS4 gets the cogs

I have looked through the KDE bugs and the opensuse forums and I can't
find anything. I have a Opensuse 12.1 server with ldap accounts and
automaps etc and the clients get their home directory plus a couple
of shared directories from this box. There must be zillions of people
doing this so I am puzzled why no one else seems to get this.

Many thanks for your help, I might try 4.8 if I can work out how
to get it and see what happens then.

Mal

Can you try opening "desktop:/" in Dolphin under accounts with local and remote home directories?
Does that display cogs as well?

If it does, you might want to try increasing the preview size limit for remote files from 0mb to 1mb.

Doing the desktop:/ thing
Local homes have proper icons
Remote homes have cogs

Changing the remote preview ( to 3M ) didn't make any difference
If I drop a picture into my ( remote ) home drive I can see the
picture if I click preview

Isn't this odd

Mal

Can you please check that "Desktop Files" is checked in Dolphin > Settings > Configure Dolphin > General > Previews?

If you do not have a Settings drop down menu, try the Spanner on the right most top corner of the window.

Hi, I'm not at work now until the 3rd Jan
so there will be a long ( possibly drunken )
pause in this thread. I will give that a go
when I am back and let you know.

Many thanks and merry Christmas

Mal

Hi!

I'd like to join this discussion since I have exactly the same problem, all symptoms described by "interele" are also present on my system (openSUSE-12.1 with KDE-4.7.4), and none of the solutions proposed by "bcooksley" fixed the problem (I tried all of them, including the preview settings for desktop files in dolphin).

I could, however, replace the cog wheel by a different icon as follows:
1.) right click icon in dolphin
2.) open "Properties" dialog
3.) click the "Edit file type" button on the "General" tab
4.) click on the cog wheel
5.) select a different icon and confirm everything

Then the icon clicked in step 1.) is replaced by the icon selected in step 5.), and after logout/login all desktop icons are changed in the same way. Not that this is anything useful, but it may help to diagnose the problem.

Do you have any further ideas?

Thanks & kind regards,
Markus

Just interested, what file type did you change? Was it "application/x-desktop"?
Also, can you pastebin the content of one of the *.desktop files which is just showing a Cog?

Yes, it was "application/x-desktop".

I noted something else: when copying the content of $HOME/Desktop (which is on a remote NFS server) to the /tmp directory on the local hard disc and replacing $HOME/Desktop by a symbolic link to the previously created copy, the icons are displayed correctly. This is of course not a solution since the Desktop folder is not synchronized between different machines in this case.

I'll provide a .desktop file later when I reverted back to the initial situation since curerntly I don't have any cogs

Kind regards,
Markus