New in Fedora 7: xdg user directories [Update]

One seldom mentioned new features of Fedora 7 are the new directories in the $HOME directory. These are due to the xdg-users-dir program from the Portland xdg project. In other news, Hello Planet Fedora.

When I started my fresh Fedora 7 install I found several directories in my $HOME i never saw before. Among them:

• Applications
• Download
• Videos
• Music
• Templates

I was surprised because I haven’t seen that mentioned anywhere recently. But it was ok since I already knew that this was Portland xdg related. The directories are created by the xdg-user-dirs.

The xdg-user-dirs have the aim to create and also manage directories with pre-defined functions like “Music directory”, “Video directory”, “Documents directory”, and so on. These are also localized and are managed in the $HOME./config file.

If you want to change the pre-defined values simply modify the config file. If you want to delete a directory, point it to your home directory and afterwards trash the directory itself – in other cases the directories might be re-created.

In other news: Hello Planet Fedora! My blog has been added – well, at least the Fedora related posts. Thanks for that, I just hope that I can meet the readers’ expectations. We will see.
As a short introduction to these who are not familiar with me: In the Fedora world I am a small package maintainer who sometimes writes a howto or a bug report or tries to keep an eye on the German FedoraWiki. Outside of Fedora I also write about KDE and Linux in general. And that’s it, I guess.