Resetting the Gnome Panel

If your gnome panel settings become broken, then to avoid needing to throw away all your gnome/gconf settings you may want to try the resetgnomepanel program.

This is locally written script which attempts to correct some of the common problems. The rest of this is taken from the man page.

Description

resetgnomepanel restores the default settings for the gnome-panel. ie if a panel has been moved to deleted it will be brought back - set to the default location (e.g. top or bottom of the screen) and size etc.

It also walks the current gnome panel objects and applets lists and adds back any launchers (etc) which are missing but in the default set. ie it adds any items which have been removed (e.g. by accident) but leaves any which were added to the default set.

It also removes any objects which refer to applications which no longer exist. This can prevent certain problems with the panel that can stop it working properly.

Optionally it can kill the current gnome-panel which will cause a new one to be launched - this is sometimes needed to refresh the displayed panel objects.

Another option will remove all non-default panel objects - use with caution!

Options

• -verb N - Print more messages about what is being done
• -panel - Kill the current gnome-panel
• -zap - Remove any non-default launchers - this removes any you have added! Use with Caution!

Bugs

On occasions the results do not take effect until run a second run. Sometimes the -panel option is needed to kill gnome-panel so a new one re-reads the gconf data. On rare occasions gnome-panel will not display the changes properly until you log out and back in again.

If you are logged in more than once the settings change should affect all sessions, but sometimes they do not.

Example

Here is a simple example of using it:

$ resetgnomepanel 
Clear out any non-existant launchers
Shut down the running gconfd
Use defaults for standard launchers
Use defaults for standard applets/toplevels
Make list of panels (ensure includes standard set)
Setting panel list
Make list of panel launchers (ensure includes standard set)
Setting panel object list
Make list of panel applets (ensure includes standard set)
Setting panel applet list

Calling it with -verb 1 (or even higher) will cause it to print out lots more information about the entries it finds and sets.

Help

Please report any problems to help@maths.cam.ac.uk - this is a local program and not a standard part of Gnome.