Black and white lines and no icons! Help!

For some reason my aa1 (running linpux) has started up today with no desktop icons, although it does have the bar at the bottom, and only displaying black and white stripes. Only thing that might have caused it was installling GIMP. Help!(Relative newbie so nice n easy instructions please)

 

Is this with the basic (original Acer) desktop, or the 'advanced' XFCE desktop?

If it's the basic one, does ALT-F2 still bring up a run dialog? If so, type

Code:

xfdesktop2

into the dialog and click 'run'. This may start the desktop; if not, try again but this time tick the 'run in terminal' box, use the same command, and see what error messages are generated.

 

Its with the advanced desktop. I can get the terminal up but don't what to do next?

 

Ok; in the terminal try typing

Code:

xfce-setting-show

and see if you can improve anything by using the settings functions in XFCE. I'd suggest looking at the display settings first: the black and white stripes thing sounds like the monitor setting is wrong (though usually you wouldn't get even the bar at the bottom in that case!)

If you get error messages in the terminal instead of a settings dialog, then post them back here.

 

ok, now that was weird. Opened xfce settings and noticed 'allow xfce to manage desktop' was not checked, so checked it and re-started. Now got fuzzy ghost of settings page as well as the black and white stripes! Does not look good.........

 

I used the forum instructions to enable the right click on the desktop and all seemed great, but on restarting the standard Acer desktop has disappeared? :?
All I see is a splash page with Aspire One and a search bar. I had gone into the Emarald Theme Manager to change colours etc but nothing else.

The rightclick works and menu is there allowing me to run stuff, but I bought this for my fiance and she is a complete novice, so I really liked the Acer simple menu.

How do I get this Acer desktop back???

 

OK. Sorted

Press Alt-F2
Enter "xfce-setting-show" to bring up the Xfce settings manager
Click Desktop icon
Make sure the Allow xfce to manage the desktop is checked
Click the Behaviour tab
Under the Desktop Icons, choose the icon type you require

Mine was set to None .... hence no icons ... simple really