For those of you with either friends or family, you no doubt have had to act as their unpaid system administrator. When a phone call for support turns into a frustrating exchange of confusion, many of us turn to remote administration to provide assistance. If Ubuntu 8.10 is the operating system that is deployed, there is an issue that could ironically provide for yet another service call related to the sharing of the desktop itself. Here is the scenario:

Admin: Okay, I am having a hard time explaining it. Please open a terminal and type "ifconfig". Then tell me what it says for "inet addr".

User: Okay, I'm connecting...

{blah blah blah, Admin fixes some problem}

User: Great, thanks for your help! You are a genius!

Admin: Please, Please, I don't need a bigger ego than I already have.

{Call ends}

{Ten minutes go by}

{User calls back}

Admin: Yes....?

User: I can't set my wallpaper anymore, It's just this damn brown background. It doesn't matter what I do.

There is a bug in the dialog that enables Remote Desktop. Here is a screenshot of this dialog in the "Advanced" tab:

Now it seems logical when dealing with a remote location to choose the option to disable the wallpaper. This will do just that. But good luck trying to change it back. No matter what the user does, it does not draw the wallpaper, even when the Administrator is not connected and even after a reboot. Here is the fix:

Open a terminal window
Type gconf-editor
Select desktop > gnome > background
Check "draw_background"



That's all it takes. If someone lets me know this is no longer an issue, I will happily send this article to /dev/null.