When a lot of people come from windows to Linux they often are searching for the My Computer icon or the trash Icon on the desktop. With Ubuntu and many other distributions this is not enabled out of the box. With just a couple quick steps in gconf editor you will be on your way.

The first thing we will want to do is launch gconf-editor. You can launch gconf from the terminal or from the Run Applications Dialog box which is what I will use in this example.

Start by pressing ALT + F2

This should open the Run Application Dialog box.

Input the command gconf-editor and hit run

You will see a box very similar to the one below.

Click the arrow next to Apps

Scroll down until you find nautilus and then Click the Arrow next to it

Click on desktop so you can see the values on the right side

Put a Check mark next to the icons you want visible (Example Trash or computer icon)

Close out the box once you have made the needed changes and take a look at your desktop to make sure the changes were applied

(Note: You can now see the trash icon on my desktop in the bottom right hand corner.)

Hope you found this helpful. Be sure to check out other great Linux and Open Source tutorials!