Ubuntu’s gnome-panel instability workaround

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

I’ve been running Ubuntu 10.04 on my desktop since it came out, and about the only real annoyance I have is that occasionally the gnome-panel scrambles the order of my icons and applets. This is possibly because I keep switching the screen layout between a pair of external screens and the laptop screen itself, just using some scripts that invoke xrandr directly … but it still shouldn’t happen.

My workaround for this is to find the files that are modified when the panel attributes are changed, and put the old ones back! So, I sat in a shell finding current files in ~/.gconf using find -mtime 0 until I’d identified the ~/.gconf/apps/panel directory (not ~/.gconf/apps/panel/applets as I initially thought) as being the place to look. I created a bzr repository in that directory and checked in all the files, and in my .bashrc I just run a quick status check to see if anything has been modified … if it has, I can run bzr revert to put it back!

Sadly just killing and restarting the gnome-panel doesn’t do enough to reset the session, you’ll have to log out completely to get the panel re-organised. Unless gnome-panel listens to a signal like HUP … and I’m not going to test that today!

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Thunderbird & Ubuntu 10.04

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

Thunderbird 3 comes with Ubuntu 10.04, but sadly it doesn’t integrate with the default desktop as well as it could — it doesn’t link to the envelope icon in the Indicator Applet, and it uses its own popups instead of the libnotify mechanism Ubuntu prefers.

These are easily fixed, however …

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9150987 tells us how to add Thunderbird to the menu, along with actions such as Compose New Message and Contacts (read the whole thread to see how Calendar would work if you had Lightning installed); but it doesn’t address how to get notifications working.

The experimental libnotify-mozilla XPI for Thunderbird itself, on the other hand, provides the notification of new mail — but if Thunderbird is not running, or if there are no new messages, nothing will be visible in the Indicator.
http://ubublogger.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/how-to-install-the-experimental-version-of-libnotify-mozilla/

A combination of these two still doesn’t produce a perfect solution, but it’s good enough until Ubuntu & Mozilla sort themselves out and get Thunderbird capable of replacing Evolution on the desktop fully.

The Indicator Applet showing Thunderbird status

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